Guest
Nicole Looker,
Director of Revenue Operations at Rebuy Engine
"Revenue Architect Podcast"
Episode 5
Revenue Architect is the podcast for revenue leaders navigating the evolving landscape of sales, RevOps, and revenue management. Each episode dives into practical strategies, proven frameworks, and real stories from operators who are building and scaling modern revenue engines.
In this episode, we talk with Nicole Looker, Director of Revenue Operations at Rebuy Engine, a personalization platform that helps Shopify brands accelerate revenue.
Nicole brings eight years across Salesforce and RevOps, owning systems, strategy, and data.
She shares how to expand forecasting beyond net-new, reduce sales friction, and use AI and Data Cloud to power retention, expansion, and margin control.
Key takeaways:
- Forecasting should include post-sales, not just net-new.
- Reduce sales friction so reps can sell; RevOps enables, not policies.
- Make commissions and margin trade-offs visible in real time.
- Treat revenue as shared ownership across all GTM teams.
- Use Salesforce as source of truth and integrate cleanly with BI and ERP.
- Apply AI to spot buying signals, coverage gaps, and post-contract slowdowns.
Tune in for actionable insights from a RevOps leader on building forecast discipline, reducing friction, and driving durable growth.
Turning Retention into Revenue: Forecasting, RevOps, and AI at Rebuy
Forecasts can look precise while reality moves underneath them, especially when a big slice of revenue sits in month-to-month accounts that can churn at any time.
Nicole’s answer is to widen the lens: pair classic pipeline inspection with post-sales signals like product usage, health scores, support patterns, and expansion intent.
If you missed the conversation (or want the distilled playbook), here are the most useful patterns from Nicole’s experience.
Forecasting That Doesn’t Stop at Closed-Won
Most companies forecast net-news well enough. The blind spot is post-sales predictability. Nicole’s teams build a fuller view by blending pipeline rigor with customer-level signals that predict retention and expansion.
- Inspect weekly with sales, success, partnerships, and finance to align definitions and close dates.
- Layer product usage and customer behavior into the forecast to anticipate churn or growth.
- Ask executives what they really want from “expansion by quarter,” then design reports that answer that question.
“We can be doing better at forecasting,” Nicole says, “but only if we treat it as a cross-functional, repeatable process that includes post-sales reality.”
Remove Roadblocks, Don’t Become One
RevOps can feel like a gate. Nicole flips that by reducing friction so reps can move.
- Coach on concise, accurate data entry and keep Salesforce as the single source of truth.
- Resolve mismatches between the rep’s narrative and what’s in the system early.
- Shepherd quotes and contracts through approvals quickly instead of policing from the sidelines.
“We’re here to enable,” she notes. “Sales is judged on quota and activity. Our job is to clear the path.”
Revenue Management Is a Team Sport
At Rebuy, revenue ownership is shared. Sales, CS, partnerships, marketing, support, product, finance, and billing each hold part of the number.
- Run recurring forums by motion: new business, activation, expansion, churn.
- Give leaders cross-pollinated KPIs so every team sees their upstream and downstream impact.
- Use clear swim lanes for handoffs so effort isn’t duplicated or lost.
“When the CEO asks about a trend, RevOps is the hub,” Nicole says. “Then we bring the right teams together to act.”
Make Margin and Commission Visible in Real Time
Behavior follows compensation. Nicole is rolling out real-time commission visibility so reps see the impact of discounts and product mix before deals go for signature.
- Tie discount levels to payout so margin control happens in the moment, not after quarter-end.
- Replace “deal desk did it” excuses with scalable approval tiers and clearer rules.
“If a 50% discount shrinks your commission to almost nothing, the system should show that up front.”
Data Cloud + AI: From Signals to Actions
Nicole’s stack centers on the Salesforce Sales Cloud with Data Cloud pulling product usage from BigQuery, then pushing segments and insights back to Sales Cloud for action.
- Reps see trial and customer usage to prioritize activation, adoption, and expansion.
- A natural-language “MCP” interface lets GTM teams ask questions of Salesforce data and get instant dashboards (e.g., retention by AE).
- AI helps surface buying timing, coverage gaps, and integration risks that slow revenue recognition.
“Natural language on top of our Salesforce data has been game-changing,” Nicole says.
“It answers what teams used to ask RevOps and it’s faster.”
For Revenue Leaders: Actionable Insights from Nicole Looker
- Forecasting should go beyond net-new deals to include customer behavior, expansion opportunities, and potential churn.
- RevOps should reduce friction for sales reps so they can focus on selling instead of data entry.
- Giving sales reps real-time visibility into how discounts affect quota and commission drives healthier deal decisions.
- Revenue works best when sales, partnerships, success, marketing, and support share ownership of key KPIs.
- Strong processes and clean data should come before technology, with tools like Data Cloud added later.
- RevOps must own the post-sales journey by designing processes that support retention and expansion.
Final Thoughts
Revenue gets predictable when you design for what really happens after Closed-Won: adoption, expansion, and sometimes churn.
Nicole Looker’s approach for post-sales forecasting, frictionless enablement, real-time margin visibility, and Data Cloud-powered insights turns RevOps into the operating system of growth.
If you want to build a process-first Salesforce stack, Bolt Today can help you connect Data Cloud to surface expansion signals and embed AI where it accelerates execution.
Together, we can turn forecasts into reliable performance quarter after quarter.
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