AMA: Knowledge Vortex Salesforce Functional Analyst, Bridget Hudacs on Finance / Revenue Ops Alignment

The benefit of a deal desk is having a team focused on formalizing custom agreements with customers that are outside of standard discounting. Ideally, these deal desk deals should be large, move-the-needle/shore-up-the-bottom-line agreements. Deal Desk can minimize issues with large/custom agreements receiving incorrect discounting or service levels. How do you keep deal desk from slowing deals down? 1. Communication. From initial discovery, Sales should be working with the Deal Desk team to discuss the business case for alternative benefits/custom discounts etc so that, if the deal moves through, much of the internal discovery/ROI discussion is already done. Sales should also communicate with the customer/prospect that they are working on special incentives for the agreement, which will take time to move through a Finance and Legal process. Most customers who receive custom deals understand that special agreements take more time and discussion than a standard agreement. 2. Appropriate Scope. Deal Desk should not be involved in every sales transaction. Deal Desk isn't a solution for salespeople "discounting inappropriately". Ideally, 80% of your day-to-day sales business should be able to be handled through the sales and service organizations, with internal sales/service approvals for discounts or SLAs, as needed.

To help Finance understand the role of SDRs, you need to explain the role in a way that demonstrates anticipated cost savings and ROI based on work distribution, comp plan(s) and increased sales. Here are some specific questions and a suggested approach to demonstrating your cost savings and ROI: * Why do you need to add headcount to the sales organization? * Identify the limits/constraints of an AE-only model relative to Total Available Market (TAM) for your business * How are these limits/constraints mitigated with the addition of the SDR role? * How is work differentiated between SDRs and AEs? * Create job descriptions that clearly delineate the role of the SDR * Update your AE job description to remove SDR functions * Visualize the new sales structure through an org chart * What is the bottom line cost & ROI? * Update comp plan(s) as needed to incorporate the SDR function * Provide sales projections based on the revised sales organization model, including ROI for the additional staff costs * Provide staffing projections based on anticipated SDR-to-AE workload * Ideally, you can show that adding lower-cost SDRs for prospecting will show long-term cost savings compared to hiring additional AEs * Set timelines for initial proof of concept (if needed) Ultimately, this exercise will help you rationalize when/how to add SDRs to your sales organization. Perhaps a full add-to-staff can't be justified, but an adjustment of existing staff roles to include SDR functions can, so you can show proof of concept.

If you are doing an experiment, then you should have a hypothesis that you are testing. To justify budget for this experiment, you need to share your hypothesis and test method with Finance in the form of a business plan. Example: * Business objective: Increase sales of Widgets by $10,000 over Jan - Mar 2025 through the use of influencer marketing. * Background: * Sales of Widgets for Jan - Mar 2024 were $100,000. * Target market = Identified Persona, who gravitates toward Influencer as an expert in the field * Budget: * $100 in free Widget products for Influencer * $1,000 for 1 month of product placement (1/week video + 1/week cross-platform social posts) * ROI: 900% (anticipated return/budget) The main goal is to quantify what you think will happen if you spend this money, then support it with background information and budget. As you can see, it doesn't have to be long or involved. For example, perhaps you are looking to generate leads, rather than straight sales: Business Objective: 500 market qualified leads attributed to Influencer between Jan - Mar 2025, resulting in $10,000 sales increase by Jun 2025. Then, at the end of your experiment period, see if your hypothesis was correct. The additional benefit of having this documentation is that you can look back and see what campaigns were potentially influencing sales, so you know what worked and what didn't. In my experience, it's not always what one would expect.

In my experience, Finance requesting the additional work of monitoring Sales is more indicative of a need for understanding than control. Look into the root cause(s) of why the discounts are being broadly applied from the sales side: 1. Is it a pricing discrepancy with the market? 2. Is it a training issue with the reps? 3. Is it an outcome of how comp plans or sales quotas are structured? 4. Is it a sales strategy? (ie having a List Price, which no one ever actually pays) Once you understand the background from the sales side, have the conversation with Finance: * What raised the concern: Are the discounts impacting profit margin, or is Finance just seeing a lot of customers not paying full price? Once you understand the two sides, you can bring them together for a conversation on root causes and concerns and how to address them, with responsibilities and accountabilities for all sides. (If the issue relates to a pricing discrepancy with the market, the Product/Pricing Functional Area may also need to be involved) 1. Does the product need regional pricing or a universal price adjustment? 2. Are there specific sales benefits that require the price to be higher than competitors? 3. What are acceptable discount levels? With this discussion, if your product is one that could involve multi-year commitments, make sure to specifically clarify discount ranges for "one-off" purchases versus multi-year commitments. 4. Do the comp plan or quotas need to be revised to dissuade unnecessary discounts?

Show them the money: 1. What are current expenses with your existing tech stack? 2. What are the issues with the current tech stack? How do those issues impact the bottom line? (Ideally this is a quantitative answer, but can be qualitative) 3. If you're looking to add to the tech stack, what are the gaps that you're addressing? Why can't they be filled with existing technology? 4. If you're looking to streamline the tech stack, are the changes cost-saving or cost-neutral? What are the additional benefits that come with your recommendation? 5. Are there business risks that are addressed with your recommendation? 6. Are there other departments that champion/support this recommendation? Perhaps you can't justify the expense right now and have to make due with the existing tech stack and/or processes. But, if you have the business case ready, sometimes business situations arise that make executives look at your proposal more favorably. A real life example: I had to write a proposal to add a data back-up solution to our tech stack. This was a gap in our tech, but it wasn't well received by finance because it seemed like an extraneous expense. "Thankfully", an automation solution had been launched into the production instance of our CRM which merged thousands of unrelated customer records. It took several months to notice what had happened. If we had a data back-up solution available, we could have restored the data back to the point before this merge happened. However, because we didn't, I now had a real-life example to justify the expense: 1. I was able to show in work hours how much this one fix cost the company; 2. I was also able to explain the impact related to data integrity, as the system was the source of truth for customer data. Because it took a few months to identify that there was an issue, we were not able to recover all of the customer data. 3. The issue was also championed by other departments as a business necessity.

To improve pipeline accuracy, I first look at the process related to sales forecasting: 1. How much of the process is (or can be) assigned to objective activities (ie contract signing, request for quote etc)? 2. How well are your salespeople trained on the non-automated aspects of pipeline and forecasting? 3. Are there aspects of your sales comp plan that are tied to pipeline? 4. Who is accountable for the accuracy of the pipeline? Does that person have the right tools/authority to coach/correct contributors who aren't accountable for the pipeline/forecast accuracy? Those areas are low-hanging fruit for improvement. From there, Salesforce has great AI tools (Einstein/Forecasting) to help analyze your past results to improve your forecast. As someone with a background in data analytics, here's the big secret of data analytics: You need to know your process to confirm that the model is correct. Your data could be skewed by data inaccuracy and outlier deals. Salesforce Forecasting tools can help you refine a model, but without a consistent process that provides consistent data, you won't see great accuracy improvements. How much of the process is (or can be) assigned to objective activities (ie contract signing, request for quote etc)? If your first reaction is "What process?", that's where you need to start. What are the large categories of your opportunity pipeline? Salesforce has a lot of out-of-the-box (OOTB) stages for opportunities. Not all may apply to your business. Refine these stages and define them, so if salespeople are moving stages manually, they understand what they are communicating when they move an opportunity to the stage. How well are your salespeople trained on the non-automated aspects of pipeline and forecasting? In Salesforce, specifically, salespeople can update stages and close probability independently. If you have field history tracking on for stage and probability changes, I would analyze that data to see if there are points of confusion in the process. Maybe there are too many similar stages. Maybe the team is manually moving opportunities to a stage that should be moved via automation (ie activated contract in Salesforce = "Contract Signed" stage), or adjusting probabilities without moving stages. This effort should yield areas to clarify and coach with the sales team. Are there aspects of your sales comp plan that are tied to pipeline? I've seen competing comp plans between sales and business development, where one is comped on deals closed and one is comped on pipeline. The people who were comped on pipeline would covert leads to opportunities and changed the stage to "in progress", which positively impacted their compensation -- and negatively impacted the accuracy of the pipeline and forecast. If your company has a similar misalignment, there may be aspects of "opportunities" that are better managed through other objects, automation and/or permissions to ensure the integrity of your opportunity pipeline. Who is accountable for the accuracy of the pipeline? Does that person have the right tools/authority to coach/correct contributors who aren't accountable for the pipeline/forecast accuracy? Assuming that forecasting and pipeline is important in your organization, the work I've outlined above will help you identify and address the pain points, as well as develop/enhance coaching tools to ensure that all team members follow a consistent process. Consistent Data = More Accurate Pipeline.