In a two-part episode series, our RevOps Revolution podcast welcomes Jennifer Brannigan, who is the chief revenue officer for the digital business side of global organizational consulting firm Korn Ferry.

Jennifer describes her background as “nontraditional” for a CRO, with her career starting in HR. She eventually moved from GE’s HR leadership development program to working at NBC Universal, especially during a time when they were making some strategic acquisitions. That’s when the switch from HR to the GTM side happened: “I became very close with our SVP of sales by being her HR business partner. And she said to me, ‘If you're hard working, motivated and passionate about what you're going to do, I believe you can do anything. Come on over and sell with me. So we built the brand. I moved over to sales, and the rest was history.”

After NBC Universal, she spent 10 years at LinkedIn as the company grew and built various new business offerings, where she got involved in GTM for several acquisitions. Next came Pendo as CRO for a few years, which is where she met Jeff Serlin who was leading RevOps there at the time. Now in her current role, she’s helping lead the transition and growth of Korn Ferry's SaaS-based sales.

Part One: It’s Time to Revisit Sales Forecasting

Jeff asks Jennifer her thoughts on the current practice of weekly sales forecasting, which traditionally tends to be very deal-focused and require a lot of prep to get updates. Jeff: “Are all of these conversations needed and necessary? Like, what is the purpose of them, and are they valuable? And do they actually move the needle and lead to better outcomes?”

She says her take is that forecast calls tend to be “somewhat overweighted in importance” and not always valuable. She recommends you step back and set the goal for why you are doing the forecast, so you’re not just “reading the news” or trying to make your team look good. Rather than tying up the forecast discussion with a specific deal analysis, “let’s take it to a deal review lab where we can really dig in.” Instead, her practice is to give the sales leaders a template of things to cover and how to cover them in a way that’s more strategically valuable.

Jeff and Jennifer both describe how those attending the weekly forecasting calls can sometimes “derail” the focus, especially if it’s for example the CFO who wants to probe further into deal specifics. She prefers to keep the audience tighter and have her RevOps leader drive the call and focus on opportunities for change, while sharing deal updates with the C-suite through other mechanisms. She also finds value in including a marketing leader and BDR leader to contribute to pipeline discussions.

As Jeff expands: “The more people that are invited, and the more senior… the more performance art it becomes. It's more about, how do I look good, and how do I escape the scrutiny, which I think leads to less forecast accuracy, less transparency and visibility on why deal might not close, and therefore less asks. So I think it's counterproductive.”

Jennifer sees this all as an “art and science,” with belief that RevOps needs to bring the science and help their sales leader gain a data-driven point of view. They discuss the need and various ideas to get the team to help the forecast become more accurate, which may involve getting them to admit when things aren’t going in their favor – such as a key deal sponsor left or their pipeline just wasn’t there. She believes there can be more soft-touch ways to achieve that, such as internal contests around who was closest in their forecast. Forecast accuracy issues also can expose other issues around assumptions and KPI goals that were set at the outset, such as around conversion rates or market trends.

When hiring at scale, she feels it’s valuable to have recruiting join the weekly calls to give updates and take input from sales team leaders, because quota-on-the-street is a crucial leading indicator for success -- not just in the current quarter but for upcoming quarters. This makes sales success feel like the broader company-wide goal that it is.

Jennifer also feels it’s “pretty endemic” that organizations invest too much sales leadership time in forecasting and related reporting. “There are better ways, whether it's using technology or getting leverage from your RevOps partner resources, or just simplifying the process... you cannot have managers putting 20 hours a week into preparing a forecast.”

‍Part Two: Driving a Positive Yet Accountable Sales Culture

Jeff next focuses their conversation on questions about how a CRO can effectively drive a culture for the revenue organization. Jennifer: “I think that the sales leadership culture is your sales organizational culture. You can't bifurcate them.”

She also admits it’s challenging to foster and build a collaborative culture in sales due to the inherent competitive nature of the sales team members.

“How do we point this competitiveness to team winning versus individual winning?... If your segment was outperforming but everybody else was underperforming, no one feels good.” It’s about aligning around the goals and how to address challenges and find solutions, as well as leading by example. 

The daily accountability can be very stressful, so infusing some fun into the organization – as well as some shared value statements – can be very helpful, both Jeff and Jennifer agree as they provide examples. 

Jennifer also recommends that revenue team leaders should revisit your organization culture goals every six months, because inevitably, people and priorities evolve. 

Thank you Jennifer for being such a candid and mentoring-minded guest!

Listen to each episode in full on Apple Podcasts:

Part One: Forecasting - More Than Just Reading the News (30 minutes)

Part Two: Sales Leadership Culture is Your Sales Culture (24 minutes)

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