Revenue Grid is a revenue intelligence solution that helps sales teams capture more activity in Salesforce to better understand the true state of their pipeline.
Highlights
- Predictable revenue with contextual signals
- Identify and mitigate pipeline risk
- Unique on-prem deployment option
Forecasting is an age-old task that sales managers and operations professionals have incorporated into their daily work lives. It helps to predict which sales opportunities are likely to successfully close on a given month/quarter, versus those which are going nowhere.
Traditional forecasting is based on past data points and comparable trends. When you pause to think about it, only taking ‘what actually happened’ into consideration is rudimentary. The reality is that many factors can change the opportunity’s context in the ‘here and now’ – you need to adopt future-looking forecasting, instead of living in the past.
The ‘here and now’ data points are being generated every day in ways that are often decentralized and disconnected from the CRM – think emails, calls, and meetings, etc.
Revenue Grid combines Salesforce data with sales activities to help you better predict revenue and mitigate risk within the pipeline. Harness the signals that external activities contain, yet are concealed when not synced effectively to Salesforce CRM. Ultimately, Revenue Grid enables sales leadership and operations teams to improve forecast predictions and achieve revenue targets.
Features
Robust Connector for Activity Capture
What does this mean? In short, Revenue Grid’s platform for Email and Calendar will sync emails and meetings, and more importantly, the engagement or attendance that actually happened – there’s a lot of insight that can be gathered from intent alone.
If you are a seasoned Salesforce user, you will likely have used Salesforce’s own Lightning Connector for Outlook. You’ll also know there are some pain points at play when using the connector; it’s slow to load, slow to respond, and not particularly flexible. Furthermore, you can only complete a handful of actions from the connector, and attaching emails to records in Salesforce is very tedious.
Revenue Grid has a solution for this problem. With the plug-in for email and calendar, capturing activity signals from Salesforce has never been easier. The activities are captured within the side panel in your email client (both Outlook and Gmail are supported) which are then used to add confidence to your forecast.
Users have the ability not only to attach their email to a record in Salesforce (on any standard or custom object), but also the most critical fields are available to edit from within the user’s inbox.
This is a game changer for capturing data that will ultimately enhance your ability to predict revenue over time. The tool adjusts the predictive model as it learns over time. The more data you have about a deal, the more confidence you will have that a promising deal will close – rather than relying solely on a sales rep’s intuition.
Automatic Contact Recognition
It’s no secret that contacts are the backbone of business. Adding contacts to Salesforce can be extremely time consuming for sales reps, who speak to numerous people every day in person, on the phone, and via email. In reality, sales reps opt to neglect this task.
The Revenue Grid email plug-in can recognize contacts who are included in emails and meetings, but not yet added to Salesforce (their information is automatically captured and attached to a new Salesforce contact record).
The tool can also be set up to pre-populate some of the contact fields, such as name and email address, ready for the user to quickly add any remaining information before syncing to Salesforce. The tool can automatically determine which Account to sync the Contact to by scanning using the email domain of existing Contacts.
Activity Capture Filters
One major limitation of both Einstein Activity Capture and the standard Salesforce for email connectors is that there is no ability to filter or control what data ends up in Salesforce. With the standard Outlook or Gmail connectors for Salesforce, the tool simply copies the email from your email client, and stores it on the record (chosen by the user) – emails that could contain sensitive information are available to any user with the right level of access in the system.
Einstein Activity Capture also stores your data on third-party servers, which means that your data isn’t protected by the Salesforce platform. In addition, activities captured using Einstein Activity Capture cannot be deleted, but if you choose to migrate away from the tool, the activity is lost forever.
Revenue Grid allows admins to configure what data can be logged in Salesforce using allowlists, denylists, and custom rules. What’s more, if you choose to migrate away in the future, your activity will always be held securely in Salesforce.
Private Cloud Server or On-Prem Deployment Option
The ability to deploy Revenue Grid on either a private cloud server or on-prem deployment is unique. Organizations that already have a private cloud server or on-prem server in place can utilize these more secure options if their business requires it. This tends to be a requirement in verticals such as Fintech, Public Sector, and Healthcare.
Use Cases
Visibility Into Deals
Do you feel like you’re constantly having to interrogate your sales reps to understand the current position of a deal in the sales cycle?
With Revenue Grid, these interrogations become a thing of the past thanks to the plug-in for email and calendar. All external sales activities (such as meetings and emails) are synced directly to Salesforce, and provide managers with full visibility into each deal.
Managers have the ability to inspect deals in the pipeline from within the Revenue Grid platform; they will see an overview of the key metrics for each deal and the status icon will help them understand which deals are likely to close and which require attention.
Revenue Grid looks at signals from multiple areas, such as activities coming via the connector, but can also harness the power of conversational intelligence to understand how a call with a customer or prospect plays out – all of which affects the confidence level within a deal. Managers no longer have to trust the sales rep’s intuition alone; instead, they can rely on data to help them determine a more accurate forecast number.
Improved Deal Coaching
Sales managers spend a large majority of their time coaching reps on how to close deals. With Revenue Grid, managers have more insight into deals than ever before. Prior to a 1:1 with a rep, managers can review the pipeline and offer support on deals where it’s needed most.
Predictable Forecasting
Forecasting is often one of the last processes to be transformed by technology, as sales operations teams tend to export data from Salesforce, manipulate it in spreadsheets, and then send it out to leadership once a week. This results in a stale forecast as it’s not using live data, nor is it taking into account any of the activity or signals that Revenue Grid can offer customers.
With the activity coming from the plug-in for email and calendar, conversational intelligence, and other related signals, it’s never been easier to have a fresh, predictable forecast.
By utilizing Revenue Grid’s platform, sales leaders can be confident in their forecasts before reporting to the board. Being able to accurately predict your forecast earlier in the quarter has added benefits; teams can bring operating budgets forward, and mitigate risks in the pipeline earlier to ensure enough coverage to hit quotas.
Increase Customer Retention
Once a prospect becomes a customer, the next milestone is expansion and renewal opportunities.
With Revenue Grid, you can monitor both in the same way as new business, but these opportunities are even more critical as they make up your Net Dollar Retention (NDR) number – a key metric for most SaaS companies. NDR simply looks at how much you are due to renew for a period versus how much you actually renewed or upsold to a customer.
If you focus your efforts solely on a new business pipeline and forget about NDR, there could be a large amount of churn within the business that is unaccounted for – ultimately, this will hurt your organization.
Revenue Grid allows you to assess the health of your expansion and renewal deals. This ensures that you’re capitalizing on good, existing relationships with customers, as well as improving those where work is required, to ensure you have a consistent and predictable NDR.
Impact
- Quota projection by rep
- Status indicators
Quota Projection by Rep
The impact of capturing all activity taking place outside Salesforce to enhance your opportunity data means that you can more accurately and confidently predict your forecast (and revenue) as a business.
Below we can see the quota of each sales rep, how far they are from their target, and what the Revenue Grid projected attainment is.
As you can see, some reps are predicted to hit above their target, and some are trending well below. As a sales leader, you can drill down to identify any reps who might need more support to help them close more business, faster.
Status Indicators
Each Opportunity record will have a status indicator within Revenue Grid to show if it is trending positively or negatively.
You can understand more about the status by drilling down into the record, where Revenue Grid shows the signals affecting the status. Below we can see some key information:
- The decision maker not responding after four follow-up attempts due to them leaving the company.
- Someone from the prospect viewing a competitor listing on G2 Crowd.
- The proposal PDF file being opened three times in a week.
All of these signals give sales leaders the ability to more confidently predict whether or not this deal is going to come in.
Setup
Revenue Grid is simple to set up – the first step is to download Revenue Grid for the email service you use (either Office 365 or Gmail).
Once installed, simply login to Salesforce via the connector – this will establish the connection between your inbox and Salesforce, and you should not need any specific permissions to do this as an ordinary user. However, 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 that 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 that are supported. The Revenue Grid knowledge base includes details for other supported editions.
To enable all the features Revenue Grid has to offer, a Salesforce Admin should install the Revenue Grid managed package into 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 should be completed by the team managing the full Revenue Grid solution, i.e. the components that sit outside Salesforce – the Revenue Grid team can advise further on the setup for these items.
Pricing
Revenue Grid offers various packages and features depending on your requirements. From a revenue intelligence point of view, you can expect:
- Pipeline and deal inspection
- Best next step suggestions for reps
- Actionable deal alerts
- Deal scoring
- Sales forecasting and reports
- Team analytics
- Digital sales coaching
- Conversational intelligence
Contact the Revenue Grid team to request a quote.
Summary
Revenue Grid’s platform for email and calendar is a simple concept, but a real gamer changer. In action, it leads to giving sales managers and operations teams the capacity and confidence to accurately forecast and mitigate risk.
Ultimately, this tool improves visibility, understanding, and communication, resulting in stronger relationships and a higher chance of achieving targets.
Reach out to the Revenue Grid team to find out more.