Pigment for Pigment: Alexis Valentin, Head of Business Development

Tell me about you, your team, and what you do?

I lead business development at Pigment - a team of currently 37 people.

How often do you use Pigment?

Every day.

…and what do you use it for?

We have a few different use cases - the first is tracking the performance of the team - where are we performing well, and where do we need more resources to be successful? We can slice the data per region/team/individual, which is super helpful to make sure we’re on track to hit our targets.

The second use case is to then extrapolate to prepare for the future. If we see growth in certain geographies or segments, we allocate more headcount and resources to have better coverage. We keep a close eye on how long it takes to fill roles, because obviously that has an impact on our pipeline.

It’s also where we have our discussions with the finance team about promotions and pay rises.

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If you weren’t using Pigment, what would the alternative be?

If I’m honest, it’d a jungle of spreadsheets. 

I’m good at building formulas and things, but I’d lose loads of time maintaining clean data, duplicating sheets to send to different managers (because there’s sensitive information I wouldn’t want everyone knowing), and I’d have to completely revamp them if, for example, finance decide to allocate me more headcount.

What are the benefits you see from using Pigment?
First of all, we have the same data across every department - so the managers in my team don’t all work from different numbers. Access rights mean they can only see what they should see, too.

Second, we can run scenarios really easily. We don’t know how 2023 is going to land exactly, but we’re preparing multiple scenarios to make sure we’re ready for whatever happens.

Third, the ability to understand performance in a really granular way, by whatever metric we like. Crunching those numbers would take so much longer without Pigment.

Do you have any specific outcomes or success stories?

Yes, definitely - building quotas for our BDRs with BDR managers. We got a target from the finance team, and then we need to break down how we’re going to distribute that between the BDRs. Doing that in Google Sheets would’ve been so complicated with people joining/leaving in the middle of the year, etc.

It’s important we get all that right and that we build in buffers, because it has an impact on the numbers finance reports to investors.

Where I’ve worked previously, that normally happens with a mess of different spreadsheets - doing it all in Pigment meant all the discussions were super streamlined.

What’s your favorite thing about Pigment?

I can analyze data by myself, without bothering the finance team or the IT department. It’s also great knowing that - because all the data is centralized across the organization - I’m making decisions based on facts rather than gut feelings and assumptions.

…that’s all from Alexis for now

But if you’d like more information on how sales and revenue teams can use Pigment, you should join our next webinar on Collaborative Sales, Territory & Quota Planning for Sales and Revenue Operations teams.