What deals have slipped from this quarter?

@kstanforth how do you handle ‘Slip Reason’ internally? Imagine it’s a picklist field in SFDC, but do you have validation rules in place or force a rep to reset it every time a deal slips out of period? I like the idea and trying to figure out how we’d operationalize

Great question, @Collin Rhea - and great questions often get a fairly lengthy answer. 😅 Let me know if this is helpful!

The simplest answer is to inspect what you expect. Internally, we inspect slipped in Clari so often in our calls, it’s an expectation driven by inspection. On 1:1s and select forecast calls leaders look at ‘slipped’ in waterfall and group by ‘slipped reason’ (you’re correct- it’s a picklist), and if you do not have one selected, it is visible to the team and you are called on to answer live. There’s beauty in the simplicity of this, obviously, but it is dependent on sales leaders driving this and setting the expectation that if you move a close date out, you must indicate a reason and inspecting it live on a regular cadence. 

Other Options: 

• Flow slipped deal widget - similar to the above- add on a 1:1 dashboard and inspect reasons associated regularly to drive desired behavior.
• SFDC Validation that requires slipped reason when a deal is pushed out by a certain number of days. 
  • Bonus option: Push Counter- if you’re already doing a little SFDC admin work, give visibility into how big of an issue slipped deals are on a deal by deal basis by building a push counter that tells you how many times a deal has slipped.  Details on this build out below.
    • Tip: To see if a push counter is worth it, inspect a few slipped deals, and look at the insights panel in Clari to how many month to month pushes there are.  If you feel this is a large issue, consider the counter build so you can aggregate this info and share with leaders the extent of the issue that is certainly impacting their forecast accuracy (and spot perpetual offenders). 

Push Counter Details

• Data Type in SFDC: Number Field (Opportunity) + Workflow Rule for Field Update
• Use Case: This counter is used to see how many times a close date has been pushed out. It incrementally increases the field value by 1 when CloseDate > PRIORVALUE(CloseDate) triggers a workflow rule.
• Consideration: this would not be historically accurate for all currently opened deals, but will be accurate from when it is first implemented (if you implement it tomorrow, it will count any pushes from tomorrow onward but none previously). While Clari has a push counter in the insights panel out-of-the-box, it is not available to create queries. This new push counter could be made filterable and groupable (with preset groupings) to use for charting to see how many deals have pushed 2+ times, etc. 

Thanks @kstanforth. We do have Monthly and Quarterly push counts that use somewhat regularly, but really like the Waterfall slips > grouping on Slipped Reasons since we require people to know the context instead of having it documented today.

@Collin Rhea agreed. Love that you have both the monthly & quarterly push counters- wonder if you add in slipped reason and both are groupable if you see any correlation between the latest reason and the number of pushes ie. are budget pushes typically pushing something 2-4 times and therefore more urgent/risky than another reason.