How Gong Forecast is helping Tackle.io shave 40% off forecasting time

Imagine spending 10+ hours per week on forecasting… going through spreadsheets, piecing together data, endless conversations with sales leaders and sales reps. 

No need to imagine: This is how most B2B sales and revenue teams operate when it comes to forecasting. 

It’s slow. 

It’s painful.

It’s far from efficient.

Kate Gallucci is the Director of Revenue Operations and Jeramee Waldum is the Vice President of Sales at Tackle.io, a zero-engineering platform that provides a go-to-market solution to “help B2B software companies establish, operate, and scale sales through the cloud.”

Before rolling out Gong Forecast, Jeramee worked at organizations where he had constant forecasting battles. Every year, a new way of forecasting seemed to be introduced. Jeramee would hear questions like, “Why do we need a tool? Our CRM does forecasting! We do forecasting in spreadsheets!”

According to Jeramee, “When it comes to forecasting, Salesforce is not enough. A spreadsheet is not enough. So don’t beat yourself up to make these two tools work. Just get Gong Forecast. There is nothing better.” 

Learn how Tackle implemented Gong Forecast and now spends 40% less time on forecasting.

Tackle in a pre-Gong world

Tackle is in hyper-growth mode.

“We’re scaling quickly,” says Kate. “We have a huge need for infrastructure and accurate forecasting. As the Director of Revenue Operations, I’m working with our teams to hit our monthly numbers. Having visibility throughout the funnel and using data to improve processes matters most to me.”

Before Gong Forecast became a reality at Tackle, Jeramee, Kate, and many other sales leaders and reps spent 10+ hours per week on forecast-related tasks. Accurate forecasting is essential to running a growing organization, but 10+ hours per week is a huge time suck.

There were one-on-ones dedicated to forecasting. Losing valuable leadership time was starting to weigh on Jeramee: “If you are just talking about deals during one-on-ones, you are going to become a deal-focused culture.”

This was not the cultural vibe Jeramee and the team was looking for.

Gong Forecast meets Team Tackle

Instead, Jeramee is “striving to build a sales organization that isn’t of the super-high pressure mold.” 

Gong plays a big part in this shift at Tackle thanks to Gong Forecast’s ability to surface what’s right for the customer. Time is being saved for more important things, namely helping customers.

Gong Forecast helps identify which deals to focus on and “bubbles them up” to the top. As a result, forecasting at Tackle has been “a lot more accurate” and “a lot less painful.”

Gong Forecast helps with data integrity. Oh, and ‘It just works’

Since implementing Gong Forecast, “data cleanliness has really improved,” says Jeramee. 

Close dates are more accurate. Forecast categories are more established. The team is no longer relying on spreadsheets.

Jeramee also cites the “tight Salesforce-Gong two-way, real-time integration” for cleaner data and better insight into customer data.

Both Kate and Jeramee call out the “simplicity of forecasting” as a massive benefit to Tackle’s high levels of Gong adoption. 

Jeramee: “It’s not (over)complicated. Reps literally update their number weekly, and the rest works! This, in turn, makes it easier for the rest of the team to use more Gong.”

Kate agrees. “Anytime you roll out a new platform, there is this ‘Ugh, what do I have to learn now?’ moment, an expectation of additional work” — not something most sales reps are thrilled about. However, with Gong, adoption was met with “minimal resistance.”

Pre-Gong, the team was “managing forecasts in multiple spreadsheets”, with sales leaders collecting forecast input from teams at different weekly cadences.

“Gong offered ease and consistency,” said Kate. “All reps now enter a few opportunity notes into Gong, data that’s automatically synced from Salesforce.”

All reps are now aligned to a single cadence:

Forecasts in by Monday AM
Rep/Manager one-on-ones sometime Monday
Sales management and leadership met about a company roll-up forecast on Tuesdays

Additionally, Gong Forecast is helping the Tackle team understand how to best take action. It’s not hard. It’s not complicated. It just works. “Go into Gong, type in your forecast number, and Gong takes care of the rest.” 

Kate boasts that training was really simple as well. She would schedule 30 minute training sessions, but in reality, it only took 5-7 minutes to get everything across.

Clean data. Quick adoption. Tight integrations. 

Gong is helping align other teams within Tackle

Tackle is seeing benefits not just within the sales team. 

The Customer Success and Renewals teams have instant, real-time visibility into the sales pipeline. This allows them to be prepared post-sale. 
Enablement and Onboarding benefits** from the Gong call library — segmented by persona and specific features.
Gong helps inform (and validate) the Product team by surfacing the nice-to-have features customers are asking for.
The Marketing team is able to identify messaging, content, collateral needs that help Tackle’s sellers throughout the sales cycle.

**Gong recordings are integrated into onboarding for teams across the org, but specifically the Customer Experience group. Onboarding and ongoing enablement includes recordings of internal training calls, conversations with prospects, and feedback from customers.

Gong Forecast is the key to reliable roll-ups and predictable revenue.

Forecast with confidence. Get proactive insights about the risk in every deal. Keep everyone on the same page with a forecast that streamlines the entire pipeline in one simple view.

“Our team is scaling quickly and we needed a tool that took us beyond spreadsheets or reviewing deal by deal in our CRM. Gong Forecast allowed us to cut our forecasting down by 40%.” — Kate Gallucci, Director of Revenue Operations

Tackle can spend more time focusing on what matters most — helping sellers sell.