: Salesforce.com

Once an Opportunity has reached a stage that qualifies it as pipeline, sales should know who they’re selling to, right?

More than ever, the attention span of a B2B buyer is fleeting. B2B CEOs are adding lead response time to the short list of key metrics reviewed daily.

Why? Because every lead counts right now. When a lead raises a hand asking for sales to get in touch, the likelihood of conversion to an opportunity correlates with timely follow-up. Leadership is right to focus on this tactical metric right now. As far back as 2011, a study in the Harvard Business Review found that companies are just too slow to respond. The authors found that the reasons for this…

Most B2B marketing professionals have used the Salesforce Campaign object. But if you’ve tried to reliably track marketing spend in a finance-friendly way using Salesforce campaigns, you’ve run into some fundamental limitations. Tracking ongoing campaign spend in marketing automation platforms HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot is not possible — sadly, that’s why most teams end up in spreadsheets.

We’ve written about in-quarter sales forecasting and the importance of data hygiene and sound, repeatable process when it comes to calling your current quarter accurately.

Salesforce.com forecasting features are typically a pain to configure, use, and maintain. An industry of sorts has emerged to address some of Salesforce’s shortcomings.

With the formation of QFlow.ai, I wanted to share a bit about what QFlow is and does, but also try to answer the question: why build QFlow?

Let’s begin with the problem. Both I and my co-founder have spent years in executive positions (CFO, VP Finance, VP Operations, VP Marketing, etc.) at B2B companies. At each company, between sales, marketing, customer success, and finance, we had a lot of tools generating a lot of data. But our organizations were by and large stuck with outdated tools and skills to analyze that data.