A big highlight of Sales 2.0 last week was meeting a number of really cool people. One of whom was Ken Rudin, co-founder of
LucidEra. Not only is Ken the co-founder and VP of Products, he is also an amazing evangelist for the product and the space of Sales BI.
Ken and I had a really nice chat over coffee in which he shared with me the very cool product that he and his team have built. Going into the meeting, I did a little research on LucidEra, but got it all wrong. I was under the impression that the company competed with
QlikTech or
PivotLink. While I think that the product could be bent to do this type of BI, LucidEra is really about raising attention to the unseen red flags in your sales forecast.
The product integrates nicely with Salesforce.com and takes forecast reporting to the next level. As I've mentioned, the key theme of Sales 2.0 this year was metrics. LucidEra provides deep dive reporting on all aspects of your forecast and helps you make appropriate business decisions as both leader and an individual contributor.
For example, let's say that your average deal closes in 75 days. Beyond that, you have a level of diminishing returns and once a deal reaches 150 days, experience shows that your company has a less than 5% chance of closing those deals. LucidEra pulls this information and provides you with these details. As a sales manager, this knowledge helps me to focus my reps on where best to spend their time.
Likewise, similar reports are available for deal size, industry, product set and many others, of course with the ability to drill down into each specific deal. As there are exceptions to every rule, LucidEra is there to alert you to the exceptions and clean up the rules. Sure, your big, long lasting, government deal that your company has never closed is there, that is the exception.
The important question is how many other deals are you hanging on to that probably won't close?
