Breaking Down Information Siloes: Branch Utilizes Risk Metrics From BoostUp To Positively Impact Deal Momentum.

Last week, I sat down with Navid Zolfaghari, VP Sales, Americas, at Branch. Branch is transforming brands and users’ interactions across digital platforms. He shared with me one of the many use cases that their team is utilizing BoostUp.

The focus of today’s conversation is Risk Management. By understanding deal risk, Branch sales leadership can positively affect deal momentum. Let’s dive in.

Brandon Most, BoostUp: What were you doing before you started work with BoostUp? Could you measure deal risk or track deal momentum?

Navid, Branch: Lots of hacking in Salesforce, but it took a lot of sales ops bandwidth and still didn’t give the full picture of deal risk or deal momentum. 

Each sales manager and sales rep do their best to prioritize their accounts and opportunities, but it was based on a combination of gut and surface-level metrics. 

We didn’t have a tool in place that allowed us to look across all opportunities that gave us a good understanding of how they were “truly” progressing.

Brandon, BoostUp: So what did you rely on?

Navid, Branch: Great question. We relied on Salesforce for the most part.  We looked at the opportunity deal stage and other variables such as deal size and projected close date. This, to some degree, gave us some focus, but it never really told the whole story.

Brandon, BoostUp: Tell me more. What didn’t Salesforce allow you to do?

Navid, Branch: It was challenging to look across all of our accounts and opportunities to determine where to prioritize our time and efforts best. There were several reasons for this:

1. We manage a high volume of opportunities at a given time. Each sales rep can easily have a few dozen active opportunities at various stages that they are managing. It’s challenging to have the most optimal output of activities across the right subset of opportunities at the right time.
2. We mainly had seller reported data, but we were missing valuable information trapped in emails and calendar invites. We didn’t have a complete picture of our opportunities.
3. Even if all the data was entered and tied directly into the accounts and opportunities, it was hard to know which deals were the most active, most likely to close. This made it incredibly hard for the sales managers to help coach our sales reps and accurately forecast.

Brandon, BoostUp: How are you using BoostUp to measure deal risk? How do you use that information to affect deal momentum?

Navid, Branch: With Salesforce, we couldn’t look at the complete picture for an account or opportunity or across all opportunities.  BoostUp provides us with complete visibility into all sales activity, even the information trapped in emails, calls, calendars, and other sales tools we use at Branch. Now we can look at the complete picture, but BoostUp goes one step further and provides us with an engagement score and sentiment risk analysis to better understand each account.

* Sample demo data. For visual representation only. Not actual Branch data.

Brandon, BoostUp: How does prioritizing opportunities by deal risk help your team?

Navid, Branch: By affecting just a few deals – either by focusing on going deeper or at-risk opportunities – can translate to several million dollars of impact with enterprise-level deals. This doesn’t take into account the added benefit of giving the entire go-to-market team an account-based view on what is working and what is not. This provides managers opportunities to have more effective coaching sessions with their reps. In other organizations, is it more of an interrogation session.

BoostUp provides us with full context and sentiment for everyone interaction, every touchpoint, and allows us to progress each deal with confidence. It seems simple, but today’s tools involve a lot of time wasted to stitch together the story, and it still loses context. BoostUp’s visualization tools help us do this in just a few minutes.   

* Sample demo data. For visual representation only. Not actual Branch data.

 Brandon, BoostUp: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.

Navid, Branch: I am happy to do so. We are all active and heavy users of BoostUp. They love BoostUp because it provides them with a lot of value and allows them to do their job more effectively.