I’ve worked with a few different customers over the past couple of months that were looking to see how they could drive collaboration between their core sales reps and their product overlay specialists, as well as hold their overlay specialists accountable for rolling up their forecast.
What Do Overlay Teams Look Like?
For one customer, their overlay team was made up of sales reps from a recent acquisition. For another customer, their overlay team was spun up to support a new product rollout.
In both cases, the opportunities were owned by the core sales rep and could have multiple products attached with different product overlay specialists responsible for different products.
What Are Your Goals?
Ultimately, both of these customers wanted similar things for their overlay teams:
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To allow their product overlay specialists to view and inspect their pipeline, even though many different core sales reps could own those opportunities.
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To help their product overlay specialists collaborate with their core counterparts on deals
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To set up the product overlay specialists so they can roll up their forecast for the products they are responsible for to drive accountability.
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To provide analytics on the product overlay teams and the products they are supporting to help understand how different teams and products are performing.
How Can I Build This For My Overlay Teams?
Both customers created user lookup fields on the Opportunity to identify the product specialist for that particular product. They had already been using Opportunity Product Line Items to track products on the opportunity.
From there, we were able to implement a new mode that allowed us to query the Opportunity Product Line Items, filter on specific products based on Product Category/Product Family, and assign ownership based on the custom user lookup field on the Opportunity.
In addition, we created a new forecast tab to roll up a forecast just for their products with their targets to measure against. Here is an example of what it could look like:
Lastly, the new mode was configured in the Clari analytics modules so that the product overlay specialists could do the same type of analysis that their core counterparts do.
This is just one solution we’ve worked on for customers, but there are more that we have come across. Have you thought about other potential solutions for product overlay specialists in your organization?
Leave a comment about how you are tracking success for your overlay teams!
