Forecasting, Forensics, Account Execution, and Opportunity Management
Like most enterprise sales organizations, Red Hat faced the industry-wide challenge of outdated forecasting processes that couldn't keep up with the pace of modern revenue operations, limiting visibility into pipeline health and future planning.
Red Hat pioneered a breakthrough approach—unifying forecasting with AI-powered deal intelligence in a single workspace, giving their global teams real-time pipeline visibility and the strategic clarity to plan quarters ahead.
Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of enterprise open-source solutions and an IBM company, supports over 20,000 employees and $6B+ in global revenue. An early adopter in revenue action orchestration technology, Red Hat was one of People.ai’s first customers—pioneering new ways to automate sales rituals and transform global teams. With go-to-market teams across sales, marketing, channels, and customer success, the company depends on tight cross-functional alignment to drive growth.
As Red Hat scaled its global revenue operations, several core challenges stood in the way of growth and alignment:
Red Hat’s CRM data was fragmented and sparse—scattered across spreadsheets, emails, and individual notes. Sellers had to manually log activity across disparate tools and systems, which slowed them down and pulled focus from revenue-generating work. With only ~30,000 contacts in CRM for over 5,000 sellers, visibility into buyer engagement was minimal. New reps inherited accounts without context, leading to delayed ramp time, poor data hygiene, a lack of trust in the system, and compromised customer experience.
MEDDPICC deal qualification was fragmented and inconsistent. Prior to operationalizing their methodology in the CRM, qualification lived in presentations and informal notes, leading to uneven adoption and a lack of clarity into deal health. This made it difficult to identify risk early and coach effectively across global teams.
Account planning was treated as a check-the-box exercise—disconnected, duplicative, and rarely revisited. Multiple teams created their own versions, often working in silos without alignment. This fragmented approach limited visibility, wasted effort, and prevented teams from executing against shared goals. As a result, planning efforts had little impact on revenue outcomes.
Forecasting was slow and reactive, operating across two systems with stale data. Pipeline data was often outdated by the time it was reviewed, forcing managers to rely on side conversations and spreadsheets to gather updates. The team often found themselves living quarter to quarter—focused on pulling deals forward and plugging gaps in real time, rather than planning ahead with confidence. And Red Hat wasn’t alone—according to Gartner, only 7% of sales organizations achieve 90% or better forecast accuracy1. For Red Hat, it was clear that something had to change.
Red Hat reimagined its sales rituals to drive alignment, reduce admin burden, and improve forecast accuracy by focusing on:
To eliminate manual entry and surface a full picture of buyer engagement, Red Hat automated the capture of sales activities across emails, meetings, chats, and calls. This freed sellers from manual data logging, giving them more time to focus strategically on their accounts and engage with customers. At the same time, teams gained real-time insight into who was involved in each deal—with enterprise-grade security controls that allowed Red Hat to exclude sensitive information, while filtering out personal or confidential communications to build trust and encourage adoption.
The MEDDPICC qualification methodology was embedded directly into CRM workflows, replacing disconnected spreadsheets and documents. This operationalized a standardized approach to deal qualification that improved adoption across global teams. With AI layered on top, Red Hat focused on assessing deal health in real time, surfacing risks such as missing economic buyers or lack of recent engagement. This enabled managers and reps to take immediate corrective action, improving forecast reliability and deal outcomes through timely, data-backed insights.
Account planning evolved from a disconnected, “check-the-box” exercise into a living, dynamic, strategic process. Red Hat consolidated multiple, siloed account plans into a single, collaborative format within the CRM—eliminating duplicative work and driving cross-functional alignment. AI further accelerated the process by auto-populating company insights and relationship maps, linked directly to pipeline data to reveal whitespace and growth opportunities. To ensure a seamless transition People.ai automatically migrated more than 5,000 account plans–so every rep could pick up where they left off, with full context, from day one. By reducing administrative overhead for sellers, teams could dedicate more time to strategic discussions and customer engagement.
Red Hat’s forecasting transformation leveraged this integrated foundation, unifying activity capture, qualification frameworks, and account planning into a single workspace built on real-time data and deal-by-deal accountability. This integrated approach delivered trustworthy insights, enabled faster decisions, and gave leaders confidence in every number.
“I can see my entire forecast, tag and update MEDDPICC right there. Update my account plan, whitespace map. A one-stop shop.” — Greg Milosovic, Senior Director, Product Management
"Until now, only managers submitted forecasts. This marks a massive shift in how we run our business, driving greater accountability, ownership, and commitment at the individual seller level." — Jamie Craig, Americas Manager of Enterprise Programs and Initiatives
This transformation delivered clear impact:
"Our journey has been inspired by the need to drive more consistently impactful engagement while being more data-driven in our analysis and decision-making. The impact has been swift and dramatic, delivering new capabilities to our field sellers and leaders. We've gone well beyond enhanced reporting to harnessing the full power of Gen AI capabilities, increasing velocity and improving effectiveness. The partnership with People.ai has been key—great technology, great ideas, and great teamwork coming together to make it all happen." — Mike Quattrucci, VP, Americas Enterprise Sales
Red Hat is now scaling its AI-driven forecasting engine across the entire global sales organization—a unified and customizable AI-native forecasting solution that enables every seller and manager to plan with confidence and execute with precision.
"This new forecasting platform gives us a crystal-clear view of our pipeline and puts actionable insights directly in the hands of every seller and manager — changing the game for how we plan and execute," — Greg Milosovic, Senior Director, Product Management.
People.ai's forecasting solution is now available globally—giving revenue organizations everywhere a powerful new way to drive accuracy, efficiency, and growth.
1Gartner, “The Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Sales in 2025”
