Revenue Intelligence Gets an Update

Organizations are looking to capitalize on the emerging possibilities in the sales forecasting market. While enterprise-level sales operations at Fortune 500 companies, like Boeing, use our proven solutions to help facilitate those huge deals, you’ll still find plenty of enriching opportunities no matter how big or small your company is.

Gaining insights to drive predictable sales performance has never been more accessible. Sales teams can be confident in forecasting with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models and influence paths to engage more closely with decision-makers.

This lucrative market simply requires that your sales teams bring their top game to the table. No matter how big or small you are, you must understand how sales forecasting will affect your business now and in the future. Your sales team also can’t do it all alone. They need buy-in from key stakeholders, with special attention on those hidden influencers, who will be key to driving and facilitating the success or failure of your effort. That’s why you need serious software solutions to guide you forward.

Next Quarter gives your customers more of what they love to gain deeper insights faster. Now all users have better forecasting capabilities, enriched engagement with customers, manager-based quota management, updated user hierarchy and a library of KPIs to choose from, new views for deal movements based on opportunity and owners, AI enhancements, and so much more!

If your first approach doesn’t work, you need a backup plan with its backup plan. At Next Quarter, we help you gain the sales insights you need to drive predictable sales performance in your efforts. 

Unleash the power of your sales team

The challenge is understanding the market and the organizations and contacts you are selling to. Our forecasting solutions allow you to improve your user experience, but we don’t stop there. We streamline your forecasts and drive accountability. We also help you to strengthen the impact of your sales. 

With your proven sales team, we help you achieve your goals in the most efficient way possible. Along the way, we help you uncover and mitigate those risk factors that you may have been tempted to ignore. All of that delivers the Sales Forecast Navigator that you need to achieve your company’s short- and long-term goals. 

Forecasting

This new feature allows every user role level to create a more accurate revenue forecast by quickly identifying gaps (and the ability to adjust for those gaps) in their expected revenue. Users can adjust their opportunities, and managers can view their teams’ original and adjusted forecasts.

 Managers can then adjust individual or overall team forecasts as needed. Users can see the progress that they and their team are making quarterly to plan for corrective changes as necessary.

Engagement Scoring

As part of the Relationship Map tab, this feature will allow sales representatives to view their engagement level with contacts under the relationship map contacts grid based on their email interactions and analytics.

Users can customize each activity, tailoring it to specific business needs. Next Quarter’s enhanced in-house AI algorithms will then calculate the score. The scale presents “Low,” “Medium,” and “High” as the leading indicators of engagement level, along with an engagement score. This makes the score more insightful and actionable.

This feature will help sales and marketing teams easily visualize engagement levels with their contacts and quickly identify which contacts they need to interact with more to improve engagement.

Manager-Based Quota Management

This new feature allows users to view quarterly quotas in various forms. For example, users can view and edit quotas on their teams by displaying the details based on the Salesforce role hierarchy or the manager view. Once your user selects a view, they can easily modify the quotas on the page or export and import the changes with the click of a single button.

The platform captures changes in real-time and provides a weekly snapshot. This functionality also allows your users to compare how quarterly quotas have changed.

User Hierarchy

A user hierarchy provides a view of key performance indicators (KPIs) of the user logged in and their direct reports. The user can toggle the view between themselves or choose an immediate report and see that person’s specific KPIs and direct reports. For example, Sara is a Regional Vice President, and David reports to her. Sara can toggle between her KPIs and her entire team or switch to David’s view to see his specific KPIs and anyone who reports to him.

Uniquely available in the Revenue Intelligence module within the Next Quarter Platform, all users can choose from a library of KPIs to apply to their profile. As a result, your users are not confined to prescriptive sets of KPIs that are often defined and not customizable on other platforms.

In Revenue Intelligence, all users can choose what applies to them. Next Quarter provides more than a dozen KPIs to choose from and has exponentially more on the roadmap for future releases.

Deal Movement

This feature shows user details such as opportunity level changes by forecast category and a deal snapshot. In addition, users can compare weekly deal progress against previous weeks. The weekly comparisons can review their opportunities or compare the weekly changes of their entire team.

It’s important to note that this feature allows users to focus on their progress, while other features provide a view of the aggregated data of the user and their team.

AI Enhancements

Revenue Intelligence provides enhancements through our artificial intelligence (AI) integrations.

  • Projections — Users can see old and new projections through weekly snapshots to track changes. For example, a user can see an expected booking forecast for a future quarter and where gaps exist.
  • Scoring — Provides AI projected likelihood of closing an opportunity based on current and historical trends in the data.
  • Email Integration — The AI enhancement integrates with the user’s email to provide guided intelligence on recent interactions and recommends future activities to support continued engagement.

Sales teams can build trust in the forecasting process, provide a more accurate estimate of potential revenue, and forecast and share data with teams in real-time.

Influence Path Automation

This feature leverages the existing relationship mapping of customer contacts to recommend the optimal path(s) to connect with an influencer or decision-maker in the customer organization. In a typical company of up to 500 employees, an average of seven individuals are involved in a buying decision.

Knowing the best path to connect with and influence these decision-makers is vital to closing the deal. Account Managers can keep track of customer organizations, plan for contingencies, or adapt the account plans.

The application uses the existing organization chart as a reference and the budget owner as a starting point. Then based on an algorithm, it recommends two paths:

  • Primary path – comprising individuals in the reporting hierarchy of the budget owner
  • Influencer Path – comprising individuals that are not in the reporting hierarchy

These recommendations provide a new level of automation based on past data, giving Account Managers a clearer picture of their customer organization.

With many B2B decision-makers believing that sales representatives are unprepared, account managers can plan meetings and face-off actions with a well-researched agenda. As a result, your users can demonstrate care and commitment to the client and improve engagement with the contact, leading to fewer meetings and shorter sales cycles.

The redesigned architecture empowers you to customize the product to your business needs. Sales Forecast Navigator incorporates an intuitive user interface (UI) that helps managers quickly focus on critical activities to win more deals.

The AI-assisted sales forecasting helps triangulate user inputs and AI predictions, and teams can analyze deals by user or account hierarchy and forecast sales pipelines in a single product. To learn more about how sales and revenue leaders use Next Quater’s Revenue Intelligence module to increase revenue growth, schedule a demo today or visit us on the Salesforce AppExchange.