Adjust Sales Projections in Collaborative Forecasts
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how Collaborative Forecasts fits into the Revenue Intelligence workflow.
- Use Collaborative Forecasts as a source of truth for top-down and bottoms-up adjustments to your pipeline.
You’ve got the sales team at Get Cloudy Consulting back on track. The next step is getting your forecast to reflect that so you can show your sales leaders what you expect your sales team will bring in this quarter.
Work with Your Team to Forecast Outcomes
Collaborative Forecasts is your destination for collaborating with your team members to determine your sales projections and how much revenue is expected to come in each quarter. The Get Cloudy team has opportunity stages that map to forecast categories—these indicate how likely a given deal is to close.
Then, they can go into a new forecast tab to adjust these numbers. This collaboration hedges against risks between different deals to build a more accurate final forecast. Each week, regional sales leaders meet to share their numbers. Using Collaborative Forecasts, the entire team is using the same fields and tracking their pipeline in the same way.
Let’s Update the Forecast
Now that you have identified your best opportunities and coached your team, you can adjust the overall forecast number. The Haven opportunity that moved into commit added $415,000 to Valerie’s overall projected sales, so you want to reflect that in the forecast.
After updating the commit, you see that your numbers look better. Valerie’s commit number has moved from red to green.
Also, after coaching your team member, Vince West, he was able to move a large deal into commit. You adjust the forecast for Vince West to reflect this change. His numbers are headed in the right direction!
Your forecast reflects your collaborative understanding of the pipeline. Now you can show your sales leaders what you expect your sales team will bring in this quarter.
Pull It All Together
Throughout these units, you’ve seen how Revenue Intelligence brings together a number of tools to create superpowers for sales managers. Revenue Intelligence supports a workflow that brings together insights and actions.
First, you saw how sales manager Milly Lopez used Revenue Insights to get a high-level overview of KPIs that told her which areas to focus on. In addition, she could see her team’s performance to pinpoint areas for coaching.
Moving into Pipeline Inspection, Milly worked with her team to address some issues that brought down sales numbers. Her team members were able to adjust their predicted sales. She inspected the pipeline, and was able to review details in the deal stages to understand what was delaying certain deals. The Flow chart provided a quick visual tool of the overall pipeline flow.
Lastly, after synchronizing with her team members, Milly returned to the Forecasts tab to adjust the overall forecast numbers so that she could confidently present the collective team forecasts to her leadership team.
