How do you drive effective collaboration?

Though we have been using Clari and our current deal process for a while now, we have used the recent market slowdown to reimagine our “Opportunity Lifecycle” to drive collaboration between Managers <> Reps and ensure that our company uses the same guidelines throughout our Regions / Business Units.

Sales Stages - rearticulating the entry/exit criteria for each stage based on our different order types (New Logo, SaaS conversion, Cross-sell, etc.), building those key fields & guidance for success for each into SFDC “Path” to guide the seller, include all of those same fields in our Clari Opportunity details for easy updates

Forecast Category - unifying globally around shared definitions, using those guidelines to define Opportunity rollups in Clari Forecasting related to our “rep calls” (Best, Worst, Likely) to help triangulate submissions. (ex. if a rep submits $250k as their Most Likely but only has Opportunities in Forecast Category = Won + Commit + Likely of $100k then the Manager would want to explore that gap)

Deal Process (similar to MEDDIC) - built the key content fields into SFDC and Clari Opportunity details, developed 10 Milestones events that need to happen during each process and building those into a Clari Mode for inspection and integrating into our CRM score, creating a “% of Deal Process Complete” formula field for quick validation of whether a deal slated to close next week is really likely to close next week.

Ultimately though, these are just meaningless tools if nobody uses them so the real focus is around an ongoing enablement campaign with our front-line managers to reinforce the importance of following these 3 pillars and how it will help them and their reps be more successful. We’ve tried mandates in the past, but appealing to self-interest and “inspecting what we expect” regularly has been most effective for us.

Love the ‘inspect what you expect’ callout, Collin! For folks who are still implementing these sorts of practices, we hosted a webinar with tips similar to those you mention here. The deck from that session, which included some playbooks and templates including a 1-on-1 cheat sheet for managers and reps, is linked in our Knowledge Base. These kinds of templates can be super helpful to help those drive the adoption you mentioned amongst managers.