How do I ensure that the revenue dashboard is accurate and updated in a timely manner?

I'd encourage you to partner with your sales leadership to align on a shared vision around your reporting and analytics roadmap and get the buy-in and sponsorship that these views will be valuable and enable them to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively (e.g. focus on the right opportunities at the right time, understand where pipeline is stalled). If they buy into the vision and what you are trying to build and rollout, then I'd suggest asking for their help in reinforcing the guidelines around deal hygiene and calls to action for the sales team. If sales leadership and reps can have a clear understanding of how they will get value from these dashboards, then they are much more likely to contribute towards ensuring their accuracy. Since this is a new approach for the organization, it will take some time and continued reinforcement and communications to drive this behavior change. 

Forecasting rigor and hygiene will be critical to your success. If you are just getting this dashboard off the ground I would make sure there is a component of the dashboard that speaks to the last time an opportunity was updated. Additionally, if you are tying stages to a business forecast you should make sure you have a regular live sync or a regular push of information to your key stakeholders to state what you are forecasting. When they come back with a feeling your number is low you can expose the formula you are using and the values going into it. By creating a more consistent cadence you can ensure the stages are updated at more frequently.

In a short sentence, in a fast-moving, complex, and inter-dependent revenue engine, whatever is not in the CRM does not exist. Creating an aligned case around this notion and building reinforcement via incentives and accountability is key. A few tactical tips and examples:

• Strengthen the case: First, do you have full conviction on why are you doing it? Understand your pipeline and if your percentages properly predict commercial outcomes (i.e. is ex-ante pipeline by percentage a robust predictor for ex-post closed won?). Invest time on discussing the "why" with key sales leaders.

• Drive Alignment: Communicate importance of updates to sales (in uncertain times, leaders fully appreciate how key revenue visibility is to make the right trade-offs). Familiarize yourself with the rep journey, provide visual guides and aim for simplicity: minimizing time spent not selling is also one of your goals.

• Create Positive Reinforcement: Create programs supporting and incentivizing CRM freshness. Procure pre-sales support and executive deal sponsorship for key prospects, tying those to an accurate representation in the CRM. This encourages accuracy and timeliness. Emphasize a strong understanding of analytics is often essential for sales career progression, especially into management roles.

• Create Accountability: Establish a hygiene score that considers update frequency and ex-post accuracy compared to commercial outcomes. Work with HR/People to tie some dimension of sales performance measurement to CRM accuracy to drive the desired behavior. 

The data on this type of dashboard is truly only as good as the input from the sales reps. The most effective way to get this data moving, with accuracy is to hold accountability via the sales leadership team. Opportunity stage progression measurement (aka "deal cycle time") should be a part of a quarterly forecasting motion.

To hold sales reps accountable, leaders should work with their team to identify stuck deals that have the potential to make it into the quarter (or any time period) for closure. When the rep talks about a deal closing but the data doesn't match the narrative, the leader needs to push their rep to get into Salesforce and update the opportunity.

To supplement this, you can put some visuals on your dashboard around number of deals in a given stage and average time spent. This will spark the "why" questions around how things can move faster and uncover the any data related issues.

I think the question behind this question is how to get the sales team to have good CRM hygiene so that your dashboard will be accurate and updated vs. how to build an accurate dashboard. CRM hygiene, of course, is the thing that keeps half the people reading this AMA up a night.

There are a few different things you can do here, all of which are change management tactics since that's the solution to this problem. I am sure others here have dealt with this and could offers some suggestions of what to do (and not do).

1. Automate any aspects possible of the stage updates in your CRM. For example, if there are certain activities or pieces of information that get captured to indicate the next stage, can the system automatically move the opportunity to the nexts stage for you? This takes the onus off reps and managers to get you the inputs you want and, critically, no one has to do extra work.

2. Get alignment and sponsorship for the stage management project from your CRO, SVP of Sales, and the sales management team. If they understand the why and use the dashboard to run their business the can be your most influential lever in getting the stage updating behavior to change. This notion of a "sponsorship spine" is incredibly powerful in pushing change into an organization.

3. Be clear on the "WIIFM" (what's in it for me) for the reps. Will this help them create more pipeline? Close more deals? If you can't articulate this you'll have a much harder time getting the change you want. Related to that, find the people who do it well already (someone at your company is probably very good at this and, I hope, it shows in their results). You can highlight these people as to why following your process is a contributor to success.

4. Sticks and carrots. How are you going to highlight the people who comply and those who do not? We send out weekly hygiene dashboards that show how the various teams are doing on a series of CRM data topics we care most about. This keeps the issues top of mind and provides visibility to the entire org on how we are doing.

The accuracy and timely updating of your revenue dashboard within Salesforce are largely dependent on the quality of your data input. In light of the above, here is a brief strategy to help alleviate the challenge of the updates from your sales team positioning the use of opportunity stages as percentage indicators toward closed-won to inaccurately:

• Start by instilling strict data entry disciplines. Educate the sales team on how their actual inputs lead to the correctness and dependability of the revenue dashboard. The principle “trash in, trash out” is highly essential in ensuring that the accuracy of the strategic decisions and outcomes is a direct reciprocation of their meticulousness in updating bytes into the CRM.

• Automate Data Entry: Where possible, automate the sales team’s work to minimize the workload of manual entry . I would use automation in the salesforce process builder or flow to auto-update stages according to specific actions or characteristics. This action lessens the probability of human error and encourages data reliability.

• Regular training and reinforcement: Schedule regular training sessions to stress the importance of timely updates in the CRM system. Incorporate practical examples that demonstrate how updating data in real time influences the dashboard.

• Set clear expectations and accountability: Creating appropriate time charts is paramount. Time frames for salespeople’s changes in data should form part of team member performance metrics. Define your expectations and prioritize your colleagues swiftly.

• Simplifying the process: Audit data entry flows to ascertain whether they require excessive information or under-exploitation. The more complicated the method, the less likely it is that the process will be followed.

This question delves into a common challenge in revenue operations. Sales teams primarily focus on prospecting, building customer relationships, and closing opportunities (as they should). Therefore, reporting and forecasting must strike a balance between valuable field input and a consistent methodology for weighted accuracy.

Pushing reps to update stages solely for probability figures will yield diminishing returns. While stages are crucial for visualizing the funnel's progress, overemphasizing them can add unnecessary administrative burdens on the field.

From my experience, stages are not always the best indicators of a deal's probability to close. I have lost count of the opportunities I have seen skip stages, let alone the opportunities that create and close within 24 hours. Assigning percentage indicators based on stages introduces complexity with inconsistent data which results in a lack of fidelity between forecasted and actual closing outcomes.

Instead, I recommend adjusting revenue dashboards to present your sales plan attainment in three buckets: pipeline, forecast, and bookings.

• First, start tracking pipeline. This dashboard should be able to tell you:

  • What is your current open weighted and unweighted pipeline?

  • What is your pipeline generation week over week, month over month, quarter over quarter?

  • How healthy is your pipeline? Age, ASP, distribution across your ICP or product mix.

• Then introduce a simple forecasting approach:

  • Simplify the field inputs, provides reps a field to type in their forecast amount.

  • Then ask them to fill out their confidence level. Use a simple picklist and keep it straightforward with Commit, Best case, and Upside scenarios.

  • Apply weightings to these confidence intervals (e.g., Commit: 80-95%, Best Case: 40-60%, Upside: 25% or lower) to derive a weighted forecast.

  • Now you can consistently roll up a weighted forecast by looking at opportunities in closing within the period, their forecasted amount and multiplying it by each opportunity's weighting.

  • Evaluate on a quarterly basis if your weightings based on the confidence intervals align with what you see in reality.

  • Layering this forecast with a view of opportunities as they progress through stages allows for sanity checking. For instance, if an AE labels an opportunity as a commit but it remains in an early stage, further investigation is necessary to understand their confidence level.

• Finally, include bookings to date to track pacing towards targets and identify any gaps in booking velocity compared to previous periods.

By incorporating these elements into your revenue dashboard, you will have a more robust system that does not overly rely on AE stage updates.