Week 2: What deals slipped from last quarter?

Tip:
Pipeline hygiene is critical here just like for the Week 1 exercise. Make sure you don’t have open deals with close dates in the past, or your analysis will be incomplete. 

Also, in order to leverage the forecast category breakdown like Clari does in the tutorial video linked above, make sure your opportunity/deal stages in Salesforce are mapped to forecast categories in Clari accurately. 

For slipped deals, is it possible to calculate average # of month-to-month pushes, average # of days since opp was created, average # of days in current stage. If not in Clari, can the details from the insights sidebar be exported to a spreadsheet?

@Stephanie Pisani great to see how you’re thinking about this!

Here’s my 2 cents:

• Tracking the frequency of deal slippage/pushes:

In Clari- You can see a recently slipped deal form Opportunity view. A deal that was recently pushed will appear “red” in the close dat column. But when it comes to tracking average number of pushes, I don’t think there’s an in-app feature for that. I suggest creating multiple saved views in Flow for slipped deals, one for each of the last 4 quarters. Export each saved view to capture the slipped deals. From there, you can get a feel for # of slips happening MoM or QoQ. 

• Visibility into average # of days since opp was created:

I suggest making a custom field in Salesforce to track this. You can pull the data into Clari eventually if you want to see it there. Curious, how do you foresee using this data? 

• Average # of days in current stage:

This is another one that is a Salesforce native project in my mind. I know it’s going to require turning on opportunity stage history tracking. Understanding time in stage is a vital revenue operations metric!

I’m hoping the Clari team will chime in here too to track what I may be missing. :) @Ankita Kumari , @Shaundra Toy 

Let us know how this lands with you, Stephanie! 

Thank you! I’m trying to understand if slipped deals are perhaps older opps that slip repeatedly and don’t progress to higher stages.

@Stephanie Pisani absolutely that’s a great way to understand the underlying cause of slippage. Check out this post from @David Ogborn where he digs into a recommended approach to tracked slipped deals: https://community.clari.com/best-practices-learnings-wins-tips-70/you-should-have-slipped-deal-reasons-a-push-counter-550

William’s week 2 work: Where deals are slipping. 

Our deals are slipping from Best Case 24%, Pipeline 73%, Commit 3/%.

• Looking into Best Case the largest stages experiencing slippage are Delivered Value and Proposal & Negotiation. 
  • After inspecting Delivered Value it becomes apparent that there is not enough pain and my thought is that the AEs are moving stages to quickly without really validating or doing due diligence in the previous stages. 
  • Proposal and Negotiation seems to be getting bogged down in procurement and legal, which leads me to believe that we are not estimating the time it takes to get deals done. One thought is that RevOps can address this by providing data on deal type and length broken down by average stage, which could help AEs estimate a more accurate close date.
• When I looked into why deals are slipping in Pipeline the Delivered Value stage really stood out, which after inspection reinforced my belief that our AEs are progressing deals along too quickly.
• Finally in Commit, first this was a super small set, which was good to see. Like the other two forecasting stages Delivered Value featured predominantly (so we definately have an issue here), Proposal & Negotiation was the second highest and again reinforced that getting through legal and procurement are processes that are bogging down deal velocity. 

Two thoughts I have is that we are setting close dates that don’t reflect the actual real world and we are also not doing the work in the early deal stages to qualify the opportunity, which is leading to a lot of slippage. 

Hello, fortunately we already incorporate this view in our Business Reviews on a quarterly basis in the first weeks. 

I would like to mention that it is VERY difficult for Reps/Managers to manage “Multiple” views of anything. They want one dashboard per cadence activity (forecast, pipeline, QBRs, deal reviews, account reviews, territory reviews, etc) possibly 2-3 will be accepted if you split out new vs. renewal. 

Is there any recommendations from Clari on the change management required to get Managers and Reps comfortable with the multi-views? Or is Clari working towards improving the dashboard functionality to support?