Revenue Intelligence is the latest trend in sales/revenue operations, but what exactly is it and how can you utilize it to consistently hit your goals each and every quarter?
Making sense of the data coming from the various sources and systems implemented as part of the revenue lifecycle is extremely important. However, in most companies it’s kept in disparate locations and can be outdated. Plus, more often than not it feels like you need an advanced degree in data science to get even the smallest insight!
In today’s fast-paced market, having a solution dedicated to making sense of your data is critical if you want to accurately forecast and have consistent, predictable revenue quarter after quarter, year after year.
Revenue Grid is a solution that will take your revenue operations team to the next level and provide you with invaluable insights into your most critical business processes.
Highlights
- Contextual Signals: Take action immediately and close deals faster.
- Insightful Analytics: Highlight both successes and areas to improve.
- Color-Coded Deal Health: See instantly how deals are trending.
- Automatic Activity and Contact Capture: Never miss an activity or contact in Salesforce again.
Revenue intelligence encompasses various aspects of the selling process, including sales analytics, customer analytics, pipeline inspection, price optimization, and market intelligence. By leveraging data from multiple sources (such as CRM systems, sales pipelines, customer interactions, and external market data), revenue intelligence helps businesses make informed decisions to increase revenue, improve sales effectiveness, and enhance overall business performance.
We all know that Salesforce is the “Customer 360” platform, and it’s likely where you have the majority of your revenue related data. So, it makes sense to have a solution integrated with Salesforce that can make sense of your pipeline and all of the peripheral activities happening alongside each deal. Revenue Grid is that solution!
Revenue Grid takes your sales related data and layers its solution on top to deliver an easy-to-use, and more importantly, easy-to-understand revenue platform that gives you real-time insights into your pipeline.
One of the biggest challenges when analyzing Salesforce data is that it requires teams to extract reports into an offline spreadsheet to run advanced data analysis. This results in data that is immediately out of date because Salesforce is constantly changing! By the time a report hits the CRO’s desk, it’s often severely out of date. Fortunately, with Revenue Grid, there is a better way!
Features
So, we’ve covered what Revenue Intelligence is, now let’s see how Revenue Grid can help you achieve your revenue goals.
Real-Time Deal Insights
By far the most time consuming part of any sales manager or sales leader’s job is understanding the health of the deals in their pipeline. Pipeline is by far the most important metric across the entire sales process – without pipeline, there is no revenue. Once you have deals in your pipeline, the next step is understanding the health of those deals. But what does “deal health” mean and what does a healthy deal really look like?
At a high level, a deal that is healthy means:
- It’s likely to come in by the close date.
- It’s likely to come in at or around the current amount value.
- The economic buyer is engaged with the sales team on a regular basis.
- The overall level of activity happening in relation to the deal is consistent.
- The deal is progressing through the deal stages.
Whilst this criteria may not look too complex, actually digging into the details to be in a position to confidently address those points takes hours and has to be done for each deal in the pipeline. Ask any sales leader and they’ll likely tell you that deal inspection is one of the most time-consuming parts of their job. It leaves them little time to actually spend time coaching reps or delivering training that will improve the sales team’s performance.
Revenue Grid makes it easy to see – at a quick glance – exactly what’s going on in each deal. The color indicators immediately highlight deals that need extra attention, and managers are able to focus their efforts on the deals that matter the most. On top of these color indicators, managers can see immediately what’s affecting a deal, both positively and negatively. Signals, which we’ll cover in detail in the next section, automatically highlight issues within deals without managers needing to wade through emails, call recordings, or even speak to their sales reps.
Imagine being a sales leader and being able to see the current state of your pipeline with a single glance! This would change the way you do your job, and significantly improve your ability to forecast more accurately.
Signals, Signals, Signals!
At this stage, you might be wondering what signals actually are and why they are so important? When you are driving a car, you use signals to indicate which way you are planning to turn. In sales, signals are effectively like indicators to highlight the direction a deal is trending, either positively or negatively. These indicators can mean the difference between calling an accurate forecast and missing your number altogether.
With Revenue Grid, admins can set up signals based on predefined parameters that align with sales processes. For example, if a rep has not progressed the stage of an opportunity for over two weeks, a signal can automatically be sent to them in Slack, Teams, or via email to alert them to take action.
Signals can also come from the buyer, i.e. if they stop responding to emails – they’ve gone dark and it’s unlikely that the deal will close on time, if ever! This type of signal can be highlighted to sales leaders to better inform them about what’s happening with their team’s deals. Managers can then take the initiative to reach out to the prospect, or possibly ask an executive to reach out to help get the deal back on track.
Although the sales process might be a predefined process, deals might still have some unique elements that need to be addressed. So, not only can users take advantage of predefined signals in Revenue Grid, sales managers can also create signals manually based on what’s happening with a deal at any moment in time. These signals can then be delivered to the sales rep where they work most often, such as via email, Teams or Slack. This means the user is more likely to take action as it’s often easy to ignore bulk notifications in Salesforce.
With signals, managers no longer have to chase reps for the latest update on a deal and they can alert their reps to take action as soon as possible, improving the chances of deal closure and providing more wins for your business!
Insightful Analytics
Insights into specific deals and deal-level signals are very useful features, but what if you want to look more holistically at your pipeline? Revenue Grid has insightful analytics to help you better understand your pipeline growth, movement, and trend over periods of time using real-time data coming from Salesforce.
Sales leaders dread opening up Salesforce to see that their pipeline has changed drastically from the day before, but not being able to quickly identify what has changed. Did a big deal slip or did a lot of deals have their amount reduced?
With Revenue Grid’s Pipeline Evolution chart, it’s easy to see what’s happened to deals over a specific period of time. Leaders can quickly click into slipped deals and understand why they slipped – they can either see if there is the chance to pull them back into the quarter, or they can find sufficient coverage in other deals to make up for the loss.
Within the Forecast Table, users can see how their pipeline has changed over time, and also see it relative to their quota to ensure they have sufficient coverage to hit their number each and every quarter. Within the Forecast Table, Revenue Grid also highlights revenue leakage to help you hone in on problem areas as quickly as possible.
Revenue Grid’s dashboards give you a holistic view of what’s going on across the business, while allowing leaders to keep an eye on the pipeline and dive in deeper (where needed) to ensure their time is spent on the most critical opportunities.
While Salesforce can provide reports, dashboards, and some deal analytics, it’s often difficult to get insights without having downloaded reports on a regular basis to compare data from week to week. With Revenue Grid, this data is available at the click of a button, and is presented in an easy-to-digest format, without users needing to rely on Sales Ops or RevOps teams to give it to them.
Email Side Panel: Activity Capture, Contact Capture, and More!
One of the most useful, yet most simple features of Revenue Grid is the automatic activity capture and contact creation.
It’s no secret that sales reps hate logging their activity in Salesforce, which means they tend to only create absolutely essential activities – leaving leaders with an incomplete view of deal activity. In addition to not logging activity, logging individual contacts is tedious and time-consuming. It’s definitely not the best use of sales rep’s time, which should be spent doing what they do best: selling!
With the side panel from Revenue Grid, sales reps never have to log an activity or contact ever again – this can be done 100% automatically. Activities are created against opportunities based on factors such as the user who performed the activity (the rep) and the contacts on the email/calendar invite and opportunity in Salesforce. It is also possible to set up further matching rules in Revenue Grid.
Since activities and contacts are logged automatically in Revenue Grid, this makes it easy to create a visual representation of the level of communication happening within a deal, and at which levels it’s occurring. Users can easily see who is communicating with who, such as executive level alignment, or regular contact with the economic buyer. This also makes it easy to identify where additional communication might be needed to help close the deal.
The side panel doesn’t just log activities and contacts, it also allows reps to interact with Salesforce directly from within their email client. Email is probably where reps spend the majority of their time outside of meetings, as they’re in constant contact with their prospects and customers. Allowing them to interact with Salesforce directly within their email client is a huge time saver and ensures Salesforce is always updated.
Reps can quickly update fields like “Next Steps” directly from their email server, which reduces the amount of time it takes them to update deals and improves data quality across the board, which is always a positive!
Another simple but powerful feature of the side panel is the ability to share available meeting times with your prospects and customers. Although it’s an easy task to complete, finding time to meet, especially where there are other team members involved can be tedious. With the side panel it’s easy to give your prospects available slots that work for all team members required to attend, without needing to check calendars manually.
The features of the side panel all save sales reps from wasting time on mundane administrative tasks and allow them to focus completely on selling – resulting in more wins for your organization!
Use Cases
We’ve talked a lot about the features of Revenue Grid, but how can we apply these to real life use cases?
Improved Forecasting
Forecasting is one of the most important, yet most challenging things for any leader to get right, and when they get it wrong, the result can be catastrophic – not only to the leader, but to the company overall through a reduced valuation, reduced share price, etc. It’s no secret that a CRO’s main job is to hit their number, and when they fail to deliver quarter after quarter, they are usually out of a job.
With Revenue Grid, leaders are able to improve their forecasting ability through the features we discussed, such as:
- Complete transparency in deals
- Automatic activity logging & contact creation
- Real-time signals from multiple sources
All of these features lead to better information about each deal, meaning every user can forecast more accurately, while improving the overall forecast accuracy of the business.
Improved Data Quality
Reports are only as good as the data within them, and when reps fail to update Salesforce on a regular basis, this leads to very poor data quality (leading to poor data in reports in return). It’s a vicious cycle, and difficult to break without introducing a tool like Revenue Grid to improve data quality by automatically logging activities, contacts and making it easy for reps to update their opportunities.
For example, manually updating Salesforce with every contact associated with a deal is a tedious task for sales reps. With Activity Capture, reps no longer have to add contacts manually to Salesforce, meaning you will always know who your reps are speaking to in every deal.
Take Action Early
We discussed signals in the features section – what signals allow you to do is take action early on deals. Imagine, you’re a sales manager managing five sales reps, and on average each rep is working ten deals per quarter. Fifty deals is a lot to manage! It’s impossible to remember off the top of your head what’s going on with each deal, but using Revenue Grid’s signals allows you (as a manager) to take action where it’s required most.
Taking action early can mean the difference between a deal that closes on time and in quarter, and a deal that slips or is lost. It’s no secret that in today’s world everything is fast paced, and if you can’t keep up because you’re using outdated or inefficient processes, this could be detrimental to your business!
Taking action early can also mean taking action when it looks like you will miss your number and there is no way to claw back the deficit. Being able to pause hiring, reduce spend, and become more operationally efficient can mean the difference between being able to weather a temporary storm and sinking all together!
Executive Support for More Wins
It’s been this way for a long time in business, but strategic deals tend to be done at the executive level more and more these days. Of course, a sales rep will always be involved in getting the deal to a certain stage, but it is a known leadership principle that an executive may need to lean in to help close the deal and show the buyer they are there to support them throughout the process.
With Revenue Grid, it’s easy to see where you might need to pull in additional resources from within your own organization to help get deals done, and it’s also easy for executives to proactively identify deals where they can lean in too.
Impact
Visual Deal Inspection
Deal inspection is a workflow that typically takes up the majority of any sales leader’s time. Sales leaders are constantly chasing reps to understand what is happening in each deal, and they use this information to call their forecast.
Revenue Grid makes it easy for every user to understand exactly where a deal is at, using visual indicators such as color codes to indicate deal health, revenue leak icons to alert users where they could have revenue leakage and comprehensive signals to alert users where action is needed.
Better deal inspection means managers are no longer flying blind, sales reps are not dropping balls and time is better spent during 1:1s taking action to close deals rather than interrogating reps for information.
Deliver Consistent Results
“Consistency is key” is a well-known saying all over the world! If you are consistent, you will see success. It’s no different in sales, and calling an accurate forecast consistently will significantly improve your organization.
For public companies, this is even more important as they are required to disclose their performance to their shareholders after each quarter, and most companies give guidance as to their expected revenue for future fiscal periods – something which can have a dramatic effect on share price. Getting this right is extremely important, and having a tool that helps you deliver consistent results is key.
Increase Sales Team Performance
Whilst companies can debate the best way to increase sales and improve the bottom line, one easy way to increase revenue is to improve the performance of their existing sales reps. By reducing manual work and improving their ability to close deals, organizations that invest in tools for their sales reps will almost always see a significant return on their investment.
When sales reps are able to focus their efforts on sourcing and closing business, while the administrative tasks are done for them automatically, this will improve their performance – leading to happier reps, more deals closed, and better quality pipeline.
Setup
Setting up Revenue Grid is simple for sales users. The first step is to install the side panel for your chosen email client – either Outlook or Gmail.
Once installed, simply log in to Salesforce via the connector to establish the connection between your inbox and Salesforce – you should not need any specific permissions to do this as an ordinary user, but if you run into trouble, contact your Salesforce Admin for support.
The initial data sync may take a few minutes, depending on how much data is in your inbox, but once the initial data load is complete, the sync between Revenue Grid and Salesforce should be seamless.
It is important to note, Revenue Grid supports various Salesforce editions, depending on the “cloud” offering you have purchased, i.e. Sales Cloud, Health Cloud, etc. Below are the compatible Sales Cloud editions supported. The Revenue Grid knowledge base also includes details for other supported editions.
To enable all of the features Revenue Grid has to offer, a Salesforce Admin should install the Revenue Grid managed package in Salesforce. The package contains auxiliary custom objects and fields, classes and other components that will enhance the Revenue Grid email plug-in and allow for further customization of the solution.
The link to the latest managed package can be found here.
Further setup will need to be done by the team managing the full Revenue Grid solution, i.e. the components that sit outside of Salesforce – the Revenue Grid team will advise further on the setup for these items.
Pricing
Revenue Grid has numerous product offerings that address a whole host of business topics – even more than I’ve been able to cover in this article!
Revenue Grid offers four packages, plus the possibility to have activity capture only. The best way to understand pricing would be to book a demo with the team so they can better understand your needs and produce an accurate quote for you!
Summary
Overall, Revenue Grid provides true revenue intelligence across your business, making it easy to have a consistent and accurate forecast each and every quarter, as well as gain valuable insight into your sales processes and improve your sales team’s performance.
Book a demo with the Revenue Grid team today to see how you can transform your revenue processes!