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Salesforce Revenue Forecasting with Scott Haney of Chili Piper

Scott Haney jumped onto Sales Operations Demystified to share his knowledge and experience in Sales Operations as well as providing deep insights into Salesforce revenue forecasting. Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.

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Tools Mentioned:

Key Takeaways

Sales/revenue ops at smaller businesses can be broad

Scott currently runs ops for:

  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Customer success
  • Recruitment
  • Finance

And is currently the only dedicated operations resource in the 43 person business. Chili Piper has 7 account executives, 5 sales development reps, 3 people in customer service, and 1 sales enablement resource. It is clear that if you want to just focus on running operations for the sales team, you shouldn’t join a small business.

 Collecting rep confidence during the forecasting process

Scott currently requests reps to assign a confidence level to each opportunity in the pipeline ranging from doubtful at one end all the way to “I would bet my career on this” at the other.

Scott then uses this data during the forecasting process in combination with:

  • The director of revenue’s one on one with each AE
  • Historical close rates
  • Inbound vs outbound difference in “time to close”

The forecast is then rolled up within Salesforce, then Scott and the director of revenue meet with the CEO each Friday to present the forecast and their proposed actions.

“Tools over labour”

Chili Piper CEO, Nicolas Vandenberghe has a favourite saying: “tools over labour”. He prefers that Scott automates a process over hiring a person to run the process.

One example of this was Scott’s ability to automate the creation of an Opportunity inside Salesforce when a meeting is booked through their software Chili Piper. This saves their sales development reps a significant amount of time each week.

Scott’s #1 sales metric

Win rate.

Scott believes that the “win rate” is one of the most actionable sales metrics. It enables him to identify behaviours of his top-performing reps and also flags coaching opportunities for underperforming reps.

Scott’s single biggest operations inspiration:

Scott first tried selling to Brad in his role as a sales rep for Chili Piper, he didn’t close. Though they soon became friends after Scott asked Brad to go for lunch so he could pick his brain about sales operations. They now run the Wizard Of Ops Slack community linked above!

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