Revenue Management Forecasting: Cailin Radcliffe of Loopio

Cailin Radcliffe jumped onto Sales Operations Demystified to share her knowledge and experience in Sales Operations and Revenue Management Forecasting. Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.

You can learn more about:

• Cailin Radcliffe
• Loopio

Tools Mentioned:

• Salesforce
• Pardot
• Outreach
• Gong
• CPQ

Key Takeaways

Cailin’s first move when joining Loopio

When Cailin joined Loopio, one of the first things she did along with the VP of Marketing was to segregate the sales reps between SMB/mid-market/enterprise and between selected industries to focus their time.

This makes total sense… if there are certain industries that your product serves better than others, it makes sense to focus sales resources into these places to increase conversion rates.

Reducing “time to first deal”

Loopio recently hired a dedicated resource that reports into the sales director and is purely focussed on sales enablement. This person doesn’t report into Cailin though Cailin tasked this person with significantly reducing “time to first deal”.

By focussing in on ensuring that reps had enough pipeline to generate their first deal and ensuring they knew who they were selling too, the three most recent reps managed to close a deal within their first month whereas previously it would take up to three months.

What sales forecasting really tells you…

Cailin mentioned a quote that used to be repeated within Berkshire Hathaway: “Forecasting tells you very little about your business and a lot about the people forecasting.”

This is very true, and we have experienced this here at Ebsta also, some reps will consistently overstate their forecast and some will understate… you must understand the biases of your reps in order to forecast accurately.

Cailin’s favorite sales metric…

Cailin chooses two different sales metrics, the first was simply ARR. As obviously the best metric to explain how well your sales team is doing is the amount of revenue that the business is generating.

She also then went on to share a valuable insight when measuring the amount of pipeline Vs the number of opportunities in the pipeline. Cailin believes that amount of opportunities can be a more insightful metric as it isn’t skewed by abnormally large deals.

Cailin’s biggest influence…

Everyone.

Cailin says that she has learned from everyone on her journey from sales leaders to SDR’s and she urges people to learn from whoever they can (including from books!) during their career in sales operation.

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