The below page details the Sales Forecasting process.
Executive Cadence
Forecasts are summarized weekly in Clari and shared formally in the Revenue Meeting or asynchronously on weeks that meeting does not take place. Pipeline, deal status, next steps and account plans should always be current. Dashboards and reports based on SFDC are considered current at any time.
Team Cadence
The Regional Director/Vice President of each team will establish weekly due date/time for your forecasts submissions.The RD/VP will be responsible for using your data for forecast the following:
(Note that the above requires Renewal Loss to be forecasted)
VIDEO COMING SOON on how to submit your ARR and your ARR Basis forecasts. The following sections provide you with additional information on our forecasting methodologies and practices.
See the Command Plan Handbook page for additional details
Forecast Category will be used when forecasting any opportunity with Net ARR. For example, if you are submitting a New Business, Add On Business, or Renewal opportunity to your forecast, the Net ARR portion of the opportunity will be included in your number.
Churn Renewal will be used only when forecasting any renewal opportunities that have a probability to churn. In these cases, the ARR Basis portion of the deal will be included into your Renewal Loss forecast number.
See the Opportunity Stages overview for more information.
There are five types of categories we review when your forecasts are pushed to Clari:
Please use these terms correctly and don't introduce other words. Apart from the above the company uses two other terms:
Early in a quarter, you may not have many opportunities in Stage 4 and beyond (Best Case and up). With that in mind, you will have the ability to override the Forecast Category and Renewal Forecast Category for your opportunities in both Salesforce and Clari. Note: this does not apply to Commercial SMB and Mid-Market forecasting.
In Salesforce, go to the Opportunities Home tab:
In Clari, you will update records individually via Opportunity tab:
Credit splits are allowed at an opportunity level and can be requested by native-quota carrying salespeople. Opportunity splits must be requested before any work is shared on an opportunity and approved prior to the closed won date. Opportunity splits must be documented in Chatter on the opportunity and require approval from Regional Director and VP. Under no circumstances will double compensation (more than 100% of deal value) on the same deal will be allowed. Note: Reports and Dashboards in Salesforce will reflect the opportunity ARR unless the report or dashboard is looking at the opportunity split object. Clari will always pull in the split.
Sales Team To request an opportunity split, a sales rep should indicate the split in Chatter, tag the ASM(s), RD(s), and VP(s) for each rep for approval, and tag Sales Support to make the update once approved. Opportunity splits should be requested before any work is shared on the opportunity.
SalesOps Team
On receiving an approved request for the split, SalesOps team will update the Opportunity Splits section of the opportunity with the split details. On completion SalesOps team will cc Commissions team and Clari team to process these splits in the systems accordingly. Currently two types of splits have to be created, one for iACV splits and one for Net ARR Splits. All splits that are shared with the opportunity owner need to be created in the Opportunity - Incremental ACV 2 and the Net ARR split types (AE's splitting an opportunity). Any splits relating to any other position (ISR, SDR etc.) are to be created using the overlay split, Opportunity - iACV Overlay and the Net ARR Overlay split types.
Xactly Opportunity split crediting will automatically be calculated in the commissions system through formulas that the commissions team has set up. The Commissions team will ensure that the commissions are calculated accurately based on the split % and confirm in Chatter on the opportunity.
Clari As of FY22Q2, our Clari instance will pull in Opportunity Splits. The splits in Clari will be pulled directly from the Opportunity Split section in Salesforce.
In Clari, we have provided a simplified layout meaning that we have designed the Details tab to include the most important fields that an RD/VP will review when determining whether they will include your opportunity in their regional forecast. Purchasing Plan, MEDDPPICC, Next Steps are atop this simplified layout. You won’t have to navigate through various sections of Salesforce to enter the most important details. What's more is that sales leadership will use this exact same view when reviewing your opportunities. So while you might be more familiar with updating opportunity records in Salesforce, over time, you should find updating in Clari will prove much more convenient.
The following instructional videos are located on the GitLab unfiltered YouTube channel as private videos. If you have trouble viewing these videos please refer to this page on how to access GitLab unfiltered.
If you are a Sales Leader, will have additional access to the Forecasting Tab in Clari. You will see the following tabs:
On the right of each tab, you will see a Toggle Details button. You can click on this to expand the list of opportunities in the selected forecast category. You will have three options:
Click on the radio button for the type of opportunities you want to see (normally for forecasting calls with AEs, you will select “Open”). Then click “View Deals” to go to a full list of opportunities.
Notable items related to Monthly Forecasting
The following instructional videos are located on the GitLab unfiltered YouTube channel as private videos. If you have trouble viewing these videos please refer to this page on how to access GitLab unfiltered.
To allow our finance and analytics team to better understand the potential in our Total Landed Market (LAM or Customer Base), we ask that sales team members enter the total number of potential developers in their top 10 accounts by CARR.
Potential Users Verify field on the account. Note this should be for that individual account, not its entire hierarchy.
More info can be found here