Good Day JMI Portfolio Sales Leaders -
I'm hoping to get a 'conversation' going around understanding how best to forecast predictably. I imagine we all know what this means, but I'm interested in the methodology/process used by all.
I believe it starts at the top of the funnel which has a number of prospecting inputs (marketing, sales, partners, etc.), and ends with closed won, and everything in between. Within this funnel, we have varying aspects for each input.... size of company, specific industry, inbound or outbound, size of opportunity, and so on.
The question is, how to track each piece of this process to such a point to make it predictable. This is where I'm very interested in how you do this and what methods you use.
A little about Arena and our sales cycles:
1- Stages: Qualification, Discovery, Develop Solution, Proposal, Selected, Contracts, Won - We track conversion rates w/in these stages in total and by rep. Discovery stage is the point where sales cycles begin. Qualification is more of a nurturing stage, for the BDR and/or AE.
2- Forecast: Suspect, Upside, Forecast, Commit, Close
3- ASP's differ based on Industry and size of business with ranges from ARR of $8k to $250k and everything in between.
4- We use MEDDIC to track specific data w/in each opportunity - using drop down choice fields combined with corresponding notes for anecdotal info.
5- We use InsightSquared as well as SFDC reports and dashboards. IS2 gives me 12 month historic forecast predictions which interestingly enough are not that far off in the end.
Interested in your thoughts on this topic. Thank you!
Andrea Pitts
SVP Global Sales
Arena Solutions
408.425.1773
apitts@arenasolutions.com