Thanks for coming to our recent customer event: Focus and Forecast: How to Use Gong to Influence Your Deals. As promised, here are tips directly from Tenny Tagg and Scott Tower. These tips will help you leverage Gong to have greater forecast accuracy and get ahead of risk in your business.

Real-time changes in the constrained economy system have also expedited the need to understand your company, your direct reports, and your customer. Job #1 for Frontline Managers is to sell, which requires managers to:

• Understand the market
• Understand the customer
• Understand company processes
• Understand your people
• Lead and guide them as quickly as possible with the most effective sales action as their coach

With Gong, drilling down to the deals behind the numbers is easy, giving you immediate access to all the CRM data, deal warnings, conversation activities, and other engagement events for every deal.

Gong Forecast enables you to forecast with confidence and demonstrate command over your business, whatever your role. Call your number while looking at your current pipeline, with instant access to deal drill-downs, risk, and forecast changes, all in one place.

Gong Forecast supports your bottom-up forecasting methodology, allowing reps to update their forecast number and add notes across all forecasting categories used by your business. In turn, leaders can see their reps' forecasts in one place, and update their own, eradicating the need for labor-intensive and misaligned processes, steering away from opinion-based forecasts.

• Roll up reps' and sales leaders' forecasts in one place

• Get timely reminders and forecast update status

• Forecast with greater confidence

Recommendation: Set up a customized forecast board for your sales org. Each person will only see their own forecast; managers see the forecasts of their direct reports.

Workflow to leverage Gong Forecast to get up to speed for coaching:

Start in Deals > Pipeline to tailor coaching focus and effectively use 1:1 time after time to build trust and catch up

Look at the forecast tab to see differences in your team’s performance and tailor coaching to their needs.

Team > Market Insights

Examples:

A rep has closed most of their committed dollars and is on the tail end of their pipeline for the quarter, dig into their sales motion to understand how she has closed the opportunities in advance of the quarter 

If a rep has a significant number of opportunities in the pipeline- the focus is how to aid your rep in bringing deals over the line knowing we have an engaged buyer

Leaders are often brought into deals at risk, at the 11th hour. So as a new manager, or one who hasn’t been involved prior to risk being surfaced, how can you effectively aid your seller in the effort to save a customer/prospect? 

Deals → Forecast → Churn risk to identify one account of focus on and get all pertinent risk details on the account:

At first glance, the red flag is the minimal interaction we’ve had with the customer in the last month. Quickly we can see who the internal AM team leads are, and who/if we are talking to the right customer level -- in this case, John who is the Customer Revenue officer. 

What makes Gong Forecasting so easy is everything is in one view. 

As you click into a particular forecast category, in this case commit, you can access all of the deals that will roll-up to make your number:

Zooming in even further to the deal level is a breeze.

So rather than having to go into an account to see if a prospect has been viewing our agreement I can see that info while still in the forecasting view. 

Progress Tab: This is where you can see how changes in the pipeline are impacting your forecast over a given period of time. 

The best forecasts are predictions of the future and I think it’s data like this that can help sellers, managers, and leaders more effectively forecast. 

Gong Forecast Solves for:

• More accountability for reps,
• More confidence on how your team is pacing towards targets, 
• Better alignment on revenue throughout the whole company 
• And time savings to achieve all of this!

Look out for a post-event email tomorrow morning with the event recording. 

If you attended the event, tell us what you thought of it in the comments section below!