Over the past few months, I’ve been spending time with CEOs, CROs and board members of both publicly-traded and privately-held companies, sharing our best practices for navigating this uncertain world.
Almost everyone is looking for answers to the same question: How can they get more confidence in their future revenue forecasts?
While every conversation differs, the conclusions we come to are remarkably similar. So, I’ve recorded a series of short videos you can share with your teams to ensure you have the right instrumentation & rigor across your end-to-end revenue process.
While I hope they are helpful in these challenging times, you’ll find that many of them are also best practices even in a strong economy.
Take Care of the Base
What is the single most important thing to your business right now? Your customers. Now more than ever, make sure every stakeholder is seeing enough value in your product or service to become essential to their business.
Re-Orient Your GTM Team
Take your best hunters and move them into farming mode to nurture current accounts and secure your customer base.
Identify Your Key Revenue Metrics
Identify and analyze advanced revenue metrics in real-time, such as forecast, forecast coverage, retention, renewal rates, ASP and more to better predict where you’re going to land.
Code Your Deals with COVID Risk Scores
Re-classify every single deal by high risk, low risk or tailwind to understand what the inventory looks like, identify what the business will yield, and how you will communicate those relevant metrics to the board.
Re-Classify Your Pipeline
Do the same exercise for pipeline created and total addressable market to better understand the actual addressable market you have and the likelihood that you’ll be able to create and convert that sales qualified pipeline.
Force Sequence of Events Rigor
Run your SOE calls now to align with executive buyers and sift through your deals to identify slippage, confirm which deals are real, and decide which compelling new deals you should target.
Run Slipped Deal Reviews Weekly
Gain visibility into slipped deal patterns and themes to understand how inventory is moving, why it’s moving and communicate those learnings to your board.
Hold Executive Buyer Heart-to-Hearts
Have an honest conversation with the economic buyer to find out if the deal is actually going to happen or not. Code each deal so you can easily see if that heart-to-heart has happened.
Prioritize Value Engineering
CFOs are now scrutinizing every renewal and new order that comes their way. Get alignment and approval from both your economic buyer and champion on ROI and value proposition documents as you go through the process.
Deploy Creative Commercials
Offer an a la carte menu of options, such as providing a single year deal vs. a multi-year deal, to help both customers and net new logos control their cost, while allowing you to meet your strategic objectives.
Instrument Your End-to-End Revenue Process
Leverage the right tech stack to eliminate blindspots throughout the entire revenue process from the first outreach, to conversational intelligence, to end-to-end visibility.
Redeploy Your SDRs and BDRs
Driving top of funnel may be a challenge now, so consider leveraging your dedicated TOF team in other ways that support your new strategic business goals, such as assisting Marketing to get reviews or Customer Success for customer outreach.
War Room with Your Exec Team
Connect your entire revenue operations team to understand exactly what’s happening in the business, including current quarter, next quarter, pipeline, and renewals.
The ability to predict revenue outcomes is more important than ever. However, for many sales leaders, the forecast is more like an educated guess than an accurate projection of where your team will land.
Learn how to improve your current and out-quarter forecast accuracy, identify and manage risk, and drive predictable revenue. More free resources to drive Revenue Confidence here.