C9 Case Study I Yahoo!
Global Forecasting:
Efficiency, Accuracy, Growth
How C9 helped Yahoo transform its forecasting process
to create a well-disciplined sales organization with an
improved capacity to achieve consistent revenue growth.
About Yahoo!
By keeping people connected to what
matters most to them, across devices
and around the world, Yahoo! Inc.
creates value for advertisers who want to
establish relationships with Yahoo users.
Industry Web Services and Information
Highlights
• Global deployment of C9 Forecast across North America, Europe and Asia
• 13% increase in selling time
• Global forecast now submitted in hours
Patrick O’Leary
Yahoo! Senior Director of Sales Operations
and Strategy
• Because they lacked well-defined
forecasting metrics, salespeople had
trouble following a consistent and
disciplined selling process.
• Salespeople spent an inordinate
Currently Yahoo counts on a team of
amount of time each week gathering
nearly 1,000 members to sell advertising.
information to create their forecasts;
The Challenge:
Inaccurate Forecasts
Research has shown that forecasting
is a thorny issue. In a survey of 1,700
companies, research firm CSO Insights
found that only 46% of forecast deals
ended up in the “win” column (CSO
Insights “2013 Sales Management
“Our Sales guys love C9”
Problems at the Rep Level
Optimization Study”). Lack of accurate
this pulled them away from core
selling activities.
Problems at the Management Level
• Sales managers found it cumbersome
and time-intensive to cope with
shadow-accounting practices and
consolidate information from many
spreadsheets.
• Confusion around reported numbers
sales metrics means that executives are
made it difficult to gauge the actual
stuck leading and managing based on
status of deals and their probability of
hunches and instinct.
closing.
Before establishing a relationship
Problems at the Executive Level
with C9, the sales team at Yahoo
• Lack of faith in the accuracy of
had a fundamental lack of trust in
forecast numbers made it difficult to
forecast numbers. Pipelines were
make strategic business decisions.
plagued by excessive subjectivity,
• Forecast data was vulnerable to holes
and rampant “shadow accounting”
in Excel spreadsheets was common.
Overall, unnecessary friction and
poor communication existed between
management and the sales team.
“We had the same conversation each
week, arguing about the numbers,” says
Patrick O’Leary, Yahoo Senior Director of
Sales Operations and Effectiveness.
and inaccuracies whenever someone
was hired or fired, which made it
difficult for executives to balance
downstream business operations.
C9 Case Study I Yahoo!
The Solution: C9 Pipeline
and C9 Forecast
Based on positive results of an initial rollout
of C9 Pipeline and C9 Forecast in June 2012,
Yahoo went on to implement C9 solutions
to teams across North America, Asia, and
Europe.
Yahoo uses quantitative data generated
by C9 Pipeline to streamline, organize, and
enhance the forecasting process. With
C9, Yahoo can now benchmark its results
against past performance. And with C9’s
predictive capabilities, based on hundreds
of signals associated with each deal
opportunity in the pipeline, Yahoo gets a
quantitative assessment (expressed as a
“C9 score”) of the quality of their deals.
In addition, C9 analyzes qualitative data
such as “time since last touch” and changes
in close dates. This information is rolled up
into an opportunity-specific risk assessment
and marked accordingly as high, medium,
Here are some specific benefits and
High adoption rates of tools and
results Yahoo has seen so far.
improved Adherence to Selling Process
Early Warnings when Revenue Forecasts Drop
Before C9, an “archaeological dig” was
required to figure out why numbers had
dropped, according to O’Leary. Using a
tree-like function within C9, the sales team
now can drill into each region, down to
the individual salesperson. Seeing specific
attributes of every deal makes it easy to
pinpoint the root cause of the revenue
dropped from the forecast.
Elimination of “Data Gaming” and
Improved Sales Coaching
Unlike the traditional frustrations associated
with adopting new technology designed
to help the sales force, Yahoo salespeople
actively use C9 because it offers them a
variety of direct benefits. For example:
• Based on the activity in their pipeline,
salespeople can now see if they’re likely
to hit their quotas.
• They also know how big their pipeline
needs to be in order to make their
numbers.
• They can compare against a previous
quarter to analyze their performance.
Conversations around forecasted numbers
Measurable Productivity Gains
are now focused around the size and shape
“Our sales guys love [C9],” say O’Leary.
of the pipeline rather than data accuracy.
“They can go into the app every day to
“If someone says, ‘We’ve got another 500k
coming in next week, I can say, ‘You’ve been
working on that deal 120 days when the
see what’s happening in the pipeline.
You also automatically view changes in
C9 week over week.”
average is thirty days. What conversation
On average, Yahoo has saved two hours
did you have that made you think that?’”
of productivity a week per rep and four
The Results: Accurate
and Reliable Forecasts
says O’Leary.
hours a week for managers.
Using C9 has improved pipeline visibility and
Thanks to the detailed insights and
One salesperson told O’Leary, “This is the
analysis delivered by C9, salespeople can
best tool we’ve implemented here in five
move beyond the static information in
years. This is going to save me one-to-two
the CRM system. They also more open
hours a week.”
or low risk.
greatly improved the accuracy of forecast
reports. Once a day, Yahoo loads all its
revenue booked against contract into C9,
and then layers pipeline information from
Salesforce.com on top of that. “C9 is the
place that brings those two together so
[we] get that holistic view,” says O’Leary.
about the status of deals during coaching
conversations with their managers. With
better visibility into the early stages of
deals, sales managers now see problems in
enough time to collaborate with other parts
of the organization and request assistance
where needed.
About C9
C9 delivers predictive sales and marketing applications that increase revenue, generate more precise forecasts, and mitigate pipeline risk.
By combining data science with products that improve sales and marketing execution, C9 enables leading companies like Yahoo, Pitney
Bowes, and Google to drive predictable growth.
C9 Inc.
Tel +1.650.561.7855
177 Bovet Road, Suite 520
Fax +1.650.637.1473
San Mateo, CA 94402
info@c9inc.com
USA
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