What We Learned from Listening to Revenue Leaders

It's 9 AM Monday. Your CRO walks in and asks: "What's threatening our commit number this quarter?"

You know what comes next. Open Salesforce. Pull up the forecast spreadsheet. Toggle between six tabs. Ping three reps on Slack. Scroll through a call recording. Build another pivot table. And after an hour of detective work, you're still not sure you've found everything.

I've had this exact conversation with dozens of customers over the past year. The frustration is universal: 43% of sales forecasts miss their goal by 10% or more. Not because sales leaders aren't working hard enough. Because the data they need to answer basic questions is scattered, stale, or simply missing.

Sales teams spend 40+ hours per week gathering forecast data, validating spreadsheets, and chasing updates from reps. That's a full-time job just to figure out where you stand. And even then, you're often working from gut feel disguised as data.

The Real Problem Isn't Your Forecast. It's Your Visibility.

When I talk to revenue leaders, I hear the same story over and over: the tools exist, but the answers don't come fast enough.

The issue isn't a lack of data. It's that the data lives in too many places, requires too much manual work to assemble, and goes stale the moment a rep forgets to log a meeting.

In our conversations with customers evaluating forecasting solutions, data quality was the number one reported factor for delaying adoption. Teams knew they had a problem, but the underlying data mess made them hesitant to even try solving it.

That feedback stuck with me. And it's shaped how we think about building tools that actually get used.

What Our Customers Taught Us

Coming off of the holidays, I've been reflecting on the people who make our work here meaningful. At the top of that list? Our customers. Especially those who take the time to share insights, challenge us, and help us build tools that make their teams more effective.

Every conversation, request, and suggestion shapes our product. Over the past year, your feedback has directly influenced features that make forecasting, pipeline management, and decision-making more reliable than ever.

You told us you needed to see risk faster. That reviewing deals one by one was eating up hours you didn't have. That explaining forecast variance in leadership meetings felt like rebuilding a spreadsheet from scratch every week.

We listened. And this quarter, we released three capabilities designed specifically to answer those challenges.

What Changes When You Can See Risk in Real Time

Headlines surface your biggest forecast risks automatically. Not generic alerts. Specific patterns: stalled buyer engagement, delays in legal or procurement, slipping close dates. Each risk category shows total deal value at stake, so you know immediately where to focus.

Multi-Record Analysis lets you investigate multiple deals at once. Select five at-risk opportunities and ask a single question: "What do these deals have in common?" or "Which should I prioritize?" You get answers from complete deal history, not just whatever the rep remembered to log.

Waterfall Charts show exactly what changed in your forecast and why. Slipped deals, losses, new opportunities, wins. Every movement is automatically broken down and quantified.

Instead of walking into a leadership meeting saying "We're down $7M and we're figuring out why," you walk in saying: "$4M slipped due to extended sales cycles. Here are the 12 deals. $2.4M lost to competition. Here's where we tighten positioning. We added $900K in new pipeline tracking ahead of schedule."

That's the difference between defending your number and owning the narrative.

Why This Matters More in Q4

End of year is unforgiving. Deals that slip in January don't come back until March at the earliest. The margin for error shrinks. The pressure to hit the number intensifies.

But the fundamentals don't change. The teams that win Q4 are the ones who can answer three questions faster than everyone else:

1. What's at risk right now?
2. Where should I focus my team's energy?
3. What changed since last week, and why?

If it takes you hours to answer those questions, you're always playing catch-up. If you can answer them in minutes, you can actually lead.

I think about Red Hat's journey often. They faced scattered data across spreadsheets and siloed teams, reps buried in non-selling tasks, and manual forecasting that created surprises and wasted effort. After implementing automated activity capture, embedded methodology with AI insights, and unified forecasting, they saw a 50% increase in win rates. Now 2,000 sellers forecast from one single view, and managers have reclaimed over 1,000 hours.

That kind of result doesn't happen because of a feature. It happens because a team committed to changing how they work, and we committed to building what they actually needed.

The Small Interventions That Protect Your Number

Here's what I've learned from watching high-performing revenue teams: the best forecasters aren't the ones with the most sophisticated models. They're the ones who catch problems early and intervene before small risks become missed quarters.

A deal with stalled engagement in week two is salvageable. The same deal, discovered in week eight, is probably already lost.

A pattern of slipping close dates across multiple opportunities is a coaching conversation. Spotted early, it's a fixable behavior. Spotted late, it's a missed number.

The point isn't to have perfect data. It's to have enough visibility to take action while action still matters.

What to Do This Week

If you're heading into the final stretch of Q4, here's a practical starting point:

1. Review your biggest risks early in the week. Not Friday afternoon when it's too late. Monday or Tuesday, when you can still coach, intervene, or escalate.
2. Look for patterns, not just individual deals. One slipping deal is a rep problem. Five slipping deals with the same root cause is a process problem. The second one is actually easier to fix, but only if you can see it.
3. Use your forecast calls to drive strategy, not defend numbers. When everyone's looking at the same data, the conversation shifts from "explain this miss" to "here's what we're doing about it."

Small interventions now can make a big difference in your final number. The question is whether you have the visibility to know where to make them.

As we wrap up Q4 and head into the new year, I want to thank you for trusting us and partnering with us to improve the way sales gets done. Because of your insights, we've built features that simplify forecasting, sharpen decision-making, and let your teams focus on the deals that matter most.

Here's to starting off strong.

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