Predictable growth — showing consistency year over year — is everything, and the forecast is where it begins. Critical business decisions — budgets, headcount strategy, resource investment, and future earnings – set the North Star. Sales leaders spend hundreds of hours thinking about sales forecasting techniques that lead toward predictable revenue and accurate, actionable data. The best sales forecasting techniques answer these two simple questions: How much do we plan to sell? And when will we deliver those numbers?
As sales teams work on forecasts, unpredictable events can dramatically change them. But there are principles and truths to help you navigate these changes. Learn 4 ways to start taking a more strategic approach to your forecasting challenges.
“First and foremost, sales leaders and reps must focus on showing empathy and nurturing relationships. That goes for how we treat our customers and one another internally, because we know employee experience drives business success.”
By maintaining customer relationships now, those relationships will help you grow again when it’s time.
Forecasting is especially important for dynamic market environments. The forecast is a critical resource to plan for the months and years ahead. As soon as an extraordinary event hits, sales and finance leaders at your company will quickly want to know:
You’ll want to slice and dice this data by region, leader, rep, product, and more. To make this possible, reps need to double down on keeping all their data up to date. This is easy with tools like Sales Cloud’s built-in Pipeline Inspection. On one screen, you can easily filter opportunities by team or time period and see the most recent activity. This helps your team know what’s happening now, what’s likely to happen next, and what data is missing.
Before your sales forecasts can appropriately predict ‘how much’ and ‘when’, there are five key areas to consider: who, what, where, why, and how. Below are some simple questions to help your sales team establish forecasts with insights that matter:
“Some of these items are harder to get a read on than others. But it’s important to keep adjusting the data based on what’s happening in the field. A high-pressure scenario is not the time to give up on your forecast.”
You can also use your forecast to assess current risk to your business — also called negative forecasting. For example, a customer added a COVID-19 field in Sales Cloud to tag deals and see pandemic impact. The two key benefits they realised are:
By doing negative forecasting to gauge risk, your forecast evolves with your business.
“Sales forecasts help the entire business plan to ship products, pay for marketing, and hire employees. With accurate forecasts, the company makes better investments, like hiring 20 new developers or opening a new sales office in prime territory.”
Sales leaders operate in a ridiculously sophisticated, technology-driven environment. The gut predictions from the most confident sales rep can’t compare to the insights generated by today’s sales forecasting tech.
For example, commercial retail property group Vicinity Centres needed to understand weekly tenant changes while streamlining sales and booking. With a sales forecasting platform, they were able to save 1,000 hours annually with automated reporting, uncover efficiencies through back-office automation and much more. See the full Vicinity Centres story.
In Salesforcorce’s own internal deployment of Sales Cloud, we forecast revenue by:
We also use artificial intelligence (also known as predictive analytics) to make our forecasts more accurate. For instance, Sales Cloud Einstein Conversation Insights can track mentions of specific terms during sales calls, then map out trends. This helps managers reconfigure sales strategies to deliver the right products in the right way to prospects and customers.