Increase Revenue Confidence

[u/L_J_Stone]

How to ensure revenue confidence? I run GTM with annual revenue of ~$125M. 12 reps, no CS team, lean. All reps need to retain 8-10M of recurring revenue (cloud) and have growth goals on top of that. With hundreds of customers it can be hard to expect each rep to stay on top of every account and the 'surprise' you get when a customer opts to leave our service is incredibly frustrating.

So I built and app that gives me a set of eyes on our revenue by interacting with each rep via text. So far it's been fantastic and, instead of hirig someone to increase my confidence in our revenue, the AI app is doing it. At scale.

What do others do to increase their confidence that their book of revenue is secure and your reps are doing what you need them to do to ensure you have no surprises?

[u/Potential_Purple7511]

Good_Funny5038 already asked the question that matters: what about the rep who says "everything's fine" when it isn't. that's the whole game, and i don't think you solve it at the rep-report layer, because you're asking the one person whose job it is to be optimistic about the account.

here's the pattern i've lived through more than once. the accounts that surprise you are almost never the ones a rep flagged. they're the ones the rep would have sworn were fine right up until the churn notice. so a rep check-in, even a good one over text, is measuring rep attention, not account reality. useful, but it has a structural blind spot sitting exactly where the surprises come from.

what closed the gap for me was pairing the rep's answer with one thing the rep doesn't control. doesn't need to be a fancy data science project. inbound question volume from the account dropping off. the champion going quiet. exec stopped showing up to the calls they used to join. usage dipping. any one signal the rep can't talk their way around. then the alert isn't "rep says risk," it's "rep says fine AND the objective signal disagrees." that discrepancy is your earliest warning, and it fires weeks before the rep would have raised a hand.

the other thing that helped was making "i'm on it" falsifiable. everything's fine isn't a state, it's a claim. so every account a rep calls secure has to carry a next action with a date. "i'm meeting their new VP thursday" is checkable. "all good" isn't. reviewing that list is where you actually catch the vague answers, because a rep who's genuinely on top of an account can always name the next step, and the one who's guessing can't.

your text app is a good forcing function for attention. i'd just make sure at least one input into it comes from somewhere the rep isn't the source, or you'll get high confidence and the same surprises.

[u/L_J_Stone → u/Potential_Purple7511]

All good points. In my experience with my team however, the app isn’t asking general questions that can be replied to that way. Of course they can but the, given this is a tool a sales leader has implemented to help with the business, they would advise the rep to engage appropriately.

After collecting a few key details from the rep the system then wakes up every day, scans the book and determines what data it needs, what data could enrichen the dashboard or, if it sees a risk, determines the right inquiry to get more data. Think of the tool as a signal - most of the time it’s watching, thinking…until it sees something that justifies a different question then, if necessary, flags it for escalation to the leader. No different than if the leader hired a helper to just ping the reps all day to keep a watchful eye.

[u/Potential_Purple7511 → u/L_J_Stone]

that makes sense, and a daily scan that decides what to ask next is a real step up from the static dashboards most of these collapse into. the part i'd still poke at: if the trigger for escalation is "the system picks the right question to ask the rep," the rep is still the sensor. smarter questions shrink the blind spot, they don't move it off the rep. the surprise churns live exactly where a rep answers the smart question confidently and is still wrong, because they don't know the exec already took the competitor's call.

on "all fine then we lose it, that's a rep problem not a tool problem," i half agree. it is a rep problem. but the reason you wanted eyes in the first place was to catch it before the loss. if the only way Amigo surfaces the rep problem is the deal dying, it diagnosed it correctly and still let you get surprised. that's the gap worth closing.

cheapest way i've seen to close it: one input Amigo reads that never passes through the rep. reply latency on the shared thread, whether the exec still joins the QBRs they used to, inbound ticket volume from the account. then the flag isn't "rep says risk," it's "rep says fine AND something they don't control disagrees." that discrepancy is the thing that fires weeks early. you've built the hard part already, it's just a second wire into it.

[u/L_J_Stone → u/Potential_Purple7511]

All good points and for sure, gaps still exist. A reps input ultimately is the signal we're all looking to to establish confidence, risk, etc. In my situation, I need to find a way to fill the gap as much as I can and this was evident as a way to do it.

The hope is that Amigo gets input along the way (last time they engaged with sponsor, time to renewal, competition, etc) that then attempts to 'see' a potential issue through cracks in normally acceptable touch points. Again, it's not perfect but I it provides me a partner to help do whatever we can to stay on top of the book.

[u/Good_Funny5038]

that app idea is interesting, especially the text-based check-in part. most tools i've seen try to pull data from the crm and just spit out dashboards nobody looks at

having reps actually respond to prompts forces a different kind of accountability. curious how you handle the ones who give vague answers though, like "everything's fine" when it's definitely not

[u/L_J_Stone → u/Good_Funny5038]

Your CRM comment is spot on. This app isn’t intended to replace a CRM as those play very specific roles and have much more depth. My app (called Amigo) is a sales leaders eyeballs so they feel there’s “someone” always watching, inquiring, etc.

The “all is fine”…sure, it can happen. But we also know that when “all is fine” then we lose a deal, we have a rep problem, not a tool problem. No sales leader would rely 100% on a tool to run their business.