Forecasting Accurately with Salesforce Forecasting
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The document discusses Salesforce's collaborative forecasting features and the associated benefits, including improved forecast accuracy and real-time visibility into team forecasts. It highlights the importance of understanding risks and uncertainties related to product developments and market conditions, while also presenting issues faced by companies like Nitro in integrating collaborative forecasting with their existing systems. Additionally, it provides examples of how different organizations utilize Salesforce for effective revenue forecasting and quota attainment reporting.
Forecasting Accurately with Salesforce Forecasting
- 1. Forecast Accurately with Salesforce Forecasting Collaborative Forecasts Mike Wey Director, Product Management [email protected] @weymike Dushyant Pandya Comity Designs Founder Thomas Gadd Nitro Revenue Ops
- 2. Safe harbor statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This presentation may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If any such uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions proves incorrect, the results of salesforce.com, inc. could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed forward-looking, including any projections of product or service availability, subscriber growth, earnings, revenues, or other financial items and any statements regarding strategies or plans of management for future operations, statements of belief, any statements concerning new, planned, or upgraded services or technology developments and customer contracts or use of our services. The risks and uncertainties referred to above include – but are not limited to – risks associated with developing and delivering new functionality for our service, new products and services, our new business model, our past operating losses, possible fluctuations in our operating results and rate of growth, interruptions or delays in our Web hosting, breach of our security measures, the outcome of any litigation, risks associated with completed and any possible mergers and acquisitions, the immature market in which we operate, our relatively limited operating history, our ability to expand, retain, and motivate our employees and manage our growth, new releases of our service and successful customer deployment, our limited history reselling non-salesforce.com products, and utilization and selling to larger enterprise customers. Further information on potential factors that could affect the financial results of salesforce.com, inc. is included in our annual report on Form 10-K for the most recent fiscal year and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the most recent fiscal quarter. These documents and others containing important disclosures are available on the SEC Filings section of the Investor Information section of our Web site. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other presentations, press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase our services should make the purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com, inc. assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward- looking statements. Safe Harbor
- 3. What Sales Might Think of Forecasting
- 5. Real-time, automatic roll-ups Quota attainment visibility Collaboration with teams Multiple forecast types What is Collaborative Forecasts? +45% Improved forecast accuracy Gain a complete, real-time view of team forecasts
- 6. We Extended Forecasting Capabilities Winter ‘15 GA Overlay Forecast GA Forecast on Custom Field Adjustment Notes Spring ‘15 Owner Adjustments Summer ‘15 Cumulative Forecast Rollups
- 7. Non-Cumulative (prior to Summer feature) Cumulative Forecast Categories Difference Between Cumulative and Non-Cumulative Data is based on distinct forecast categories “Based on all the opportunities, where are the deals sitting now?” Closed Commi t Best Case Pipelin e Commit = ‘Commit’ Closed = ‘Closed’ Best Case = ‘Best Case’ Pipeline = ‘Pipeline’ Best CaseCommit Pipeline Data is based on aggregation of forecast categories “Based on all the opportunities, what will sales deliver?” Commit Forecast = ‘Closed’ + ‘Commit’ Closed = ‘Closed’ Best Case Forecast = ‘Closed’ + ‘Commit’ + ‘Best Case’ Open Pipeline = ‘Commit’ + ‘Best Case’ + ‘Pipeline’ Closed
- 8. Difference Between Cumulative and Non-Cumulative (cont.) Illustrate the difference using an example Assume all commit deals will eventually close Assume no deals pushed or pulled Cumulative Forecast CategoriesNon-Cumulative (prior to Summer feature) Which of these resonate?
- 11. Pure Storage is Flash for the Enterprise Mission-critical reliability 99.999%, non-disruptive operations Less cost than disk Inline deduplication & compression Consistent performance 100% Flash Storage System Differentiated Technology that scales with your business 10 à 100s of TBs, Purity software Founded in 2009 Leadership team made up of best in class storage and tech veterans
- 12. Confidential Property of Comity Designs - Recipient is not to share with any 3rd Parties • Forecast on a quarterly basis • Use a mix of methods to arrive at our projected bookings # • 60% of advanced stage pipe • 25% of non-factored pipe • Closed Won + % of Adv Pipe while in qtr • Use Salesforce to track new logo counts • A significant portion of our business involves cross-theater revenue splits • A percentage of our team books business that is both discrete and overlay Customizable Forecast - Standard View
- 13. lace er or logo area lide, ered tally Dushyant Pandya Founder, Comity Designs
- 14. About Comity - Proven Success Across All Clouds Salesforce Projects CSAT Score (out of 10) No Red Account Bay Area Atlanta India Hackathon Awards • Best Enterprise App • Force.com deployment • Social Enterprise App • Chatter Partner Apps are winners of Awards 400+ 9.8
- 15. 1. A way to remove the need to duplicate opportunities for revenue sharing 2. Ability for revenue sharing to show up in both parties forecasts through Opportunities Teams & Splits 3. Forecast Category only displays information for that specific category What Pure Storage Needed
- 16. 1. Collaborative Forecasts include much of the same functionality as Customizable Forecasts • Felt native and familiar to the team • Transition over was straightforward since 90% of the team would still use a standard view 2. Collaborative Forecasts works with Splits and allows viewing by specific forecast categories 3. Still needed a way to allow specific sales team to see their business across discrete and overlay opps Single custom consolidated view provides better visibility into overall forecast – Discrete + Overlay Collaborative Forecasting
- 17. Forecast Standard View – Revenue Splits Confidential Property of Comity Designs - Recipient is not to share with any 3rd Parties
- 18. Forecast Standard View – Overlay Splits Confidential Property of Comity Designs - Recipient is not to share with any 3rd Parties
- 19. Forecast Consolidated View Confidential Property of Comity Designs - Recipient is not to share with any 3rd Parties
- 20. lace er or logo area lide, ered tally Tom Gadd Revenue Operations
- 21. Nitro Transforms How the World Interacts with Documents • Founded in Australia with our global HQ in San Francisco. • 500,000 customers in nearly 200 countries. • 200 employees across 5 locations. • Nitro Pro, our flagship product, is the leading replacement to Adobe Acrobat.
- 22. • Our Salesforce Instance • Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Work.com, Chatter • 8.5 million leads, 300k API requests/day, 127 users • 300K paying customers in database (and a couple million free users on top of that!) • Great Implementation Partners Nitro’s Salesforce Usage
- 23. • Exchange rates in Salesforce must match Netsuite, our ERP • Manage 5 global currencies • Exchange rates fluctuate daily and are loaded daily • Salesforce has Advanced Currency Management (ACM) • But gotcha! • Collaborative Forecasting does not support ACM • Current workaround is to leverage Opportunity Reports to manage forecasting The Problem Not ideal since we wanted Sales to manage business through Forecasting Module instead of reports
- 24. • Collaborative Forecasting only leverages static exchange rates • Harder to manage the business since we capture commit and best case weekly based on moving exchange rates • Forecasting module data differs from Opportunity Reports • Sales Ops is unable to give quota relief without right insight • Quota attainment reporting is huge, and fractions of a percent matter • For a sales team there’s a big difference between 99.5% and 100.5%! What Does That Mean in Practice? Caused frustration among Sales, which led to lower adoption of forecasting
- 25. • Winter ‘15 brought Custom Field Forecasting (CFF) as a feature to explore • Makes it easy to forecast on amounts like ACV and TCV at the same time • But gotcha! • Opportunities can only have one currency, so your custom field currency has to match your record currency • Some creative algebra to support ACM in forecasting • Goal – trick the forecasted amount = converted amount on oppty • Worked backwards to come up with Custom Currency Field Leverage Custom Field Forecast with Creative Algebra Custom Currency Field = Converted Amount Static Exchange Rate = Static Exchange Rate Amount * Dated Exchange Rate
- 26. • All of this might seem confusing to sales users • Hid custom field from sales users – no need to understand back end • Just made sure data is consistent between forecasting and oppty historical amount • Opptys can be outdated quickly since we update exchange rates daily • Created batch APEX solution to update custom field nightly • Very simple implementation – 2 custom fields, 1 workflow, 1 trigger, and 1 class Keep Solution Simple Only 30 lines of code!
- 27. • Greater adoption of forecasting module • Sales managers leverage tool to manage team and business • Sales can explore “pipeline” to improve outlook • More accurate forecasting • Quota attainment reporting! • “Holy grail” for me and Nitro • Waited 3.5 years for solution • Achieving this was awesome! Potential Benefits
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- 29. Q&A
- 30. Thank you