How to Drive Predictable Revenue with More Accurate Sales Forecasting

Companies that predict their future are those that survive, grow, and remain resilient in times of adversities. Though there aren’t a good number of reliable ways to predict what the future looks like, forecasting can help companies paint their quarterly and monthly sales picture despite various turbulences in the market.

Having a robust process in place gives you more visibility leading to more accurate sales predictions. This sharpens key stakeholders’ insights into various business activities, and thus, helps them close loopholes and lead the entire team to actions that increase profitability.

Though all organizations across industries use sales forecasting techniques, the capabilities widely vary between those just starting with spreadsheets and those who deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to delve deeper into their customers’ preferences and other areas of business. As businesses become more efficient in sales forecasting, the greater will be their capabilities to predict future outcomes and prepare better for the same, while increasing ROI significantly.

Discover Your Sales Forecasting Skill Level

Beginner: Forecasting Using Spreadsheets

Sales forecasting at the beginner stage requires manual inputs. Though it helps you track information, there’s scope for quite a lot of errors. Manually entering data is taxing, siloed, and many a time ambiguous.

Such forecasting strategies don’t link to other information (like sales) or future opportunity stages. This results in inaccuracies that negatively impact the growth of the company at all levels and can’t even project how customers are moving from inquiries to sales.

Intermediate: Tracking Opportunities with CRM Software

In the intermediate stage, sales reps use CRM software to store data of all prospective and existing customers and discover and track sales opportunities.

As per a survey done by Salesforce in 2021, organizations that used CRM witnessed a 28% increase in sales forecast after implementing Salesforce.

By forecasting opportunity categories and stages, companies can not only sharpen their business acumen but also enhance their resource allocation efficiencies. With a CRM, opportunities are more defined and clearer compared to those confined to spreadsheets in the beginner stage. And, as a matter of fact, the businesses can increase their prediction accuracy.

Advanced: AI-powered Sales Predictions

Companies today are moving away from spreadsheets and relying more on sophisticated forecasting applications. The main reason for this shift is CRM is moving beyond marketing and sales functions into finance, operations, and service aspects of business , thereby having a greater impact on the growth of the company. This reveals how important CRM is to a business irrespective of its size.

For CFOs it helps signal earnings, giving all stakeholders, including employees, customers, and shareholders a predictable path. CRM when powered by predictive analytics provides the right insights to your sales system, helping teams with highly accurate sales forecasts and eventually helping everyone hit their numbers. CRM systems help you:

· Identify Opportunities that Are Likely to Close

AI-enabled predictive analytics algorithms can give insights to organizations whether sales opportunities are heading to closure or not.

· Enable Optimal Use of Resources

AI assists sales reps in identifying the right stage to approach a prospect in the customer journey. This allows businesses to allocate their marketing and sales resources wisely.

· Know Where to Invest

The sales team is the backbone of organizations large and small alike. Connecting the dots between sales and its impact on the growth of the company helps key stakeholders identify areas to invest in and justify the additional headcount required for the next financial quarter or year.

Steps to Improve Your Team’s Forecasting Process

Who wants to run away from revenue opportunities? No one! With the right tools and strategies in place, your success is assured. Adopting a CRM system is essential to boost your sales revenues. You also need to train your team to use the CRM system to forecast sales and take steps to enhance its productivity, to meet your sales targets.

Here are a couple of points to put into practice if you want to improve your forecasting capabilities

· Rally Your Teams Around Well-defined Goals

Set clear goals and key performance indicators for your team. This helps the team know what to focus on and enables its leaders to get the desired results.

· Use AI to Get the Big Picture of the Customer

When CRM tools like Salesforce Sales Cloud are properly implemented into a business process, businesses can get a 360-degree view of a customer, enabling organizations to create a single source of truth.

You can make the most out of forecasting only when you include all business areas and get a bigger picture of your organization. All in all, you can improve the accuracy of your predictions better.

As you can see, managers can now use forecasting tools and techniques to predict the quantum of sales with high efficacy. You need to team up with an experienced CRM solutions provider who can help you use robust platforms such as Salesforce. Make sure the organization you partner with clearly understands your sales process and data forecasting before you ink a deal.

Hope you liked this post. How do you plan to use sales forecasting tools? We’d love to know.