3 Pillars to Predictable Sales Growth

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Toscane Ngwena, and I'm joined today by my distinguished colleague. His name is Terry Guyton. Together, Terry and I will, will walk through today how Salesforce manages pipeline and forecasting with confidence.

And to get us started, I want to talk about our forecasting philosophy. You see, at Salesforce, Our philosophy is very simple. It's about turning data into confidence. It's not just about predicting outcomes. While that is incredibly important, it's about creating a shared rhythm around accountability, insight, and action. You see, for us, forecasting isn't just another sales activity. It is a leadership discipline, and it's a discipline that we have instilled in our business at every single level of the organization, from our AEs to our CROs. And we have scaled this across all of Salesforce globally, across thousands and thousands of roles and function across the org. So the 3 key pillars of forecasting at Salesforce that helps us drive predictable growth are our people, our process, and our data and our tools. The people is where it all begins. Our people are actually creating the data. They're opening and creating the opportunities. They're putting next steps, actions, all of the information that fuel our data at the aggregate level. But they do more than that. The people here at Salesforce actually drive the culture, they drive the accountability, and they help us align globally on our shared goal of finding predictability. And we're able to accomplish that through our incredible process that we have aligned on globally. And Tuss is going to take you through all of that. What our process is, but it's really simple. It's about aligning and defining on the same key metrics. No matter what function or industry or region you're in, we think about forecasting the same, and we do it in lockstep every single week, Monday through Friday, the same activities are happening around the globe at the exact same time. And we're able to do that because of the data and the tools. That is the product. That is the outcome. All of this data that comes in from the field and is aligned globally through our process gives us one key source of truth that everyone is aligned on, and we look at it the exact same way, from strategy and programs to the AEs in the field, to our global executives. We're all aligned on one key resource. And let's start by talking about our people. In any great organization, The people drive the culture, and that couldn't be more true here at Salesforce. But people often think about culture at this large company level, but it also happens in forecasting. Forecasting isn't just data and analytics and numbers, it's actually a very human exercise. And here at Salesforce, we pride ourselves in driving a high-performance culture. And I want to start by saying that we are customer obsessed. And if you doubt that for even a moment, just look at what we're doing here today. That's right. This is the evidence. We at Salesforce are passionate about our customers. We're passionate about all people. That's not exclusive to our employees. And everyone should know our number one key value at Salesforce, and that's trust. We really believe in the trust, and that trust allows us to have difficult conversations. We believe in radical transparency. And so now we've talked about the culture, but I want to talk about all of the people that make this possible. Believe it or not, sales is a team sport. Everyone always thinks about the account executive, but it's so much more than that. It takes all of these people to make this reality, from programs and strategy and operations, but also all of these functions. Our partner alliances team, they help us identify our SI consulting partners, our ISV partners on AppExchange. That implement our solutions and help us go to market. Our BDR team, our business development representatives, they take leads and turn them into quality pipeline. All of these functions, customer success, building long-term sustainable relationships with our customers, all of this has to be true. But they're not just here doing their jobs in silos. They're a part of the forecasting too. As a sales strategist, I will tell you there is someone from every one of these teams on our forecast call every single week, and they're not just there in attendance, they're participating, they're adding their perspective, they're bringing valuable insights. And when this whole team comes together, it's another part of the puzzle that drives predictable growth. And now when we're kind of talking about our sellers again, I want it to be known that we drive accountability at every single level of the organization. Everyone has their part on this mission that is finding predictable growth. The AEs are at the tactical level. Like I said before, they open that opportunity, they put the next steps, the actions, they're doing the admin, and that drives the data. But then the managers come in and the managers take their experience and they identify the trends that they've seen in the past, and that comes with the data. And now we're getting to a really strong place of trust where we know that this data has been screened. They don't just accept it for what it is. They inspect it, and they add judgment, and they commit, and it is completely scaled across the organization. And then at the highest level, at all of our executives across Salesforce, in all of our regions, now they're seeing a bottoms-up process. These opportunities, this data has been through the field, through our managers, all the way up to our executives, and it takes the whole part of the process to get to a final single source of truth of data that we can trust and we, we can use to drive key business decisions.

I'm going to walk us now through the process we use internally at Salesforce. It all starts with the opportunity record. This is the start of our forecasting journey, and it's really what fuels our tech stack. You heard Terry say a few moments ago, if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist. And so we understand that if it's not right in this record, then we don't have the right information as we go forward. And so managing the opportunity record for us in a thoughtful way, in a thorough way, is so essential because it allows us to have the right data in a single source of truth. And so with that, once an opportunity has been created, whether an AE created an opportunity in APAC or in Japan or in LATAM, They didn't just create an opportunity, they created pipeline. And on this slide, which is one of my favorite slides, you can see that these are the stages that a deal or the pipeline goes through as it matures, right? Our sales stages help our sellers think through their selling process. And each stage in the slide speaks to a decision gate or a checklist that the seller must go through even as they contemplate closing their deal. You can also see on the slide that we consider that stage 2 is a qualified opportunity. What that means is that once an opportunity hits stage 2, we begin to monitor its progress and its quality across all of our tools and our dashboards and even our cadences. And you can see that once it hits stage 4, that is advanced pipe or progressed pipe, its propensity to close just increased. And right at the end there, you can see stage 6. Stage 6 is our commit. That means that deal is ready to close. Now that we've covered how that opportunity is managed in Sales Cloud, let's talk a little bit about how we bring that level of discipline into the forecasting process. You see, at Salesforce, forecasting runs on a weekly cadence. It runs all year long. We never miss a week. You see, the process starts on a Monday when our COO and our CRO and all the chief executives are running their focus call. And then on the Tuesday, all our first-line managers are getting together and reviewing their deals. In addition to reviewing their deals, they're also preparing for their focus calls. While all this is happening, the AE continues to update and refresh their opportunity records so that that data remains fresh and it's ready. We see this rolling up to RVPs, to AVPs, to the SVPs, even the EVPs back to the CRO at the end of the week. This tops-down and then bottoms-up rhythm is what drives alignment for us. It's what drives consistency for us. And everyone knows what's expected. Is expected. The frequency that you see on the slide is exactly what drives accuracy for us here at Salesforce. So we talked about the opportunities, we talked about the stages that they go through as they're being piped. We also looked at the operational cadence in a given week. What happens when the deals are being reviewed by those managers? All this is bubbling up into a single view across all the levels of leadership in our business. It's across the SVPs, the EVPs. And once it does that, the output of all of this is that at every level, we're measuring these common metrics. Again, whether you're in APAC or LATAM, these are the same metrics that we're measuring on our dashboards. These are pipe gen, open pipe, and ACV. ACV is our term for revenue. We do at Salesforce.

So let's take a look at what the global forecast dashboard looks like for us here at Salesforce. So this is the tool. This is the output. That one single source of truth that I was talking about before, this is what the output looks like. If I don't look at anything else for the rest of my time here at Salesforce, this is the only thing I need to look at. I open this every single morning when I'm drinking my cup of coffee to get a feel for the strength of the business. I see the leader's commit and all of the pipeline metrics that align to it. You can dig in to each of the direct reports. You can look at it at the aggregate, at the product. You look at it every single level. When the people and the process come together and they create clean, trusted data, this is what the output looks like. And now I know this is a really pretty slide, and I saw you all take pictures of it, and I'm glad you did. But now I'm going to show you how it comes to life what a quick morning inspection might look like. All right, so this is me in the morning having my cup of coffee, doing a quick inspection on the business. The first thing that I want to do is go into the first level and select the leader whose business I want to inspect, and all of the metrics will update based off of that leader in our hierarchy. And I filter on the month, the quarter, whatever reporting period that I want to drill into, and I get to this first view. This number here, the commit, that's what the leaders call in for that period. And then all of the metrics are based off of that. How much we've closed against it, the gap to commit, the how much pipeline we have relative to the commit. I double-click in here. I've got pipeline generation. I've got create and close in the period. How many million-dollar-plus deals do I have? Everything at the aggregate level is right here. I scroll down and I'm able to inspect at each of the directs. Every row is one of the direct reports and all of the columns going left to right are the same data points that we see at the leader level. I go further and I start looking at the account view. Who are our top accounts that we're working with this month, this quarter? Then I drill in and I see all the opportunities that fuel into each of those accounts. And then I've got all of these customized views, these bar charts, these graphs comparing against the historical baselines, looking at deal bands. If you've got clean and accurate data, this is the possibility. This is fully customizable and you can make it fit your business's needs. These are the definitions that we've come up with and that we've aligned on. But if you implement these things, the people, the process, and the data, this is what the output can look like. And in just a minute and a half, I can have a very strong sense of the direction that we're going as a business. And so what does this ultimately do? It takes the risk out of forecasting, and it does so based off of complete, clean, and trusted data. You see, we rely on perfect data to remove bias from our forecasting processes and drive with objectivity. Forecasting isn't just about a gut feeling. It's about leveraging the evidence and the data to make critical business decisions.

Folks, as we wrap up, these 3 takeaways I want us to think about, right? I know that was a quick 18 minutes, but there's 3 things that I want us to take away here. The first thing is that predictability starts with people and with culture. The forecast accuracy we just talked about doesn't happen because we're lucky or even just the technology alone. It happens because there is people that are disciplined, that are accountable, and that are living forecasting each and every day. And we know that the people are important, and so is the culture. Culture drives behavior, and behavior drives results. Those are the cornerstones for the first thing. The second thing is that process creates alignment and trust. When everyone across the organization follows the same cadence, They speak in the same language. We have a, a focusing language that they follow. We eliminate the noise. We can move faster. We can make better decisions and ensure that every level of the business remains connected as a result. And third, and I think this is a really important one, a single source of truth powers confident decision-making. Who doesn't want to have confident decision-making? You see, when every opportunity, every data point, every forecast lives inside of Salesforce, then everyone in the business from the AE all the way to the CRO, they have the same trusted view of the business. That is so important. And when they do that, they're able to run this business in a seamless way. Folks, that's the magic of how Salesforce runs Salesforce. There's alignment, there's transparency, but there's also predictability. Folks, thank you so much for joining us and enjoy the rest of Dreamforce 2025.