Forecast Accurately with Salesforce Forecasting Collaborative Forecasts

 Mike Wey  Director, Product Management  mwey@salesforce.com  @weymike  

 Dushyant Pandya  Comity Designs  Founder  

 Thomas Gadd  Nitro  Revenue Ops  

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Safe Harbor

What Sales Might Think of Forecasting

Foundation for Forecasting

Forecasting

People Process Technology

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

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

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 Commit

Best Case

Pipeline

Commit = ‘Commit’

Closed = ‘Closed’

Best Case = ‘Best Case’

Pipeline = ‘Pipeline’

Best Case Commit 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

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 Categories Non-Cumulative (prior to Summer feature)

Which of these resonate?

Forecasting Demo

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in white area of slide,

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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

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

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Dushyant Pandya Founder, Comity Designs

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

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

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

Forecast Standard View – Revenue Splits

Confidential Property of Comity Designs - Recipient is not to share with any 3rd Parties

Forecast Standard View – Overlay Splits

Confidential Property of Comity Designs - Recipient is not to share with any 3rd Parties

Forecast Consolidated View

Confidential Property of Comity Designs - Recipient is not to share with any 3rd Parties

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Tom Gadd Revenue Operations

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.

•  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

•  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

•  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

•  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

•  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!

•  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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Q&A

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