Predict Sales and Forecast with Confidence

Learning Objectives 

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe why accurate forecasting is important.
  
• Identify the benefits of using Salesforce for forecasting.
  

Why Is Forecasting Important? 

Forecasting is more than reviewing a spreadsheet about opportunities in your pipeline. An accurate forecast is a window into your company’s overall sales health. Knowing what’s ahead is crucial to making business decisions and planning for the future. Forecasting involves analyzing opportunities that are closing within a period, measuring against sales quotas, making adjustments as opportunities move through the sales cycle, and more. 

Sales reps, managers, directors, and company executives all need forecasts to get a picture for how their reps, teams, and the company are doing.

• Do you know which reps are hitting or missing their numbers?
  
• Can you spot challenges in a deal’s sales cycle before it’s too late?
  
• Are you constantly updating spreadsheets with the latest data?
  
• Do you turn to multiple sources to get the data you need?
  
• Do you spend extra time putting together materials to present your forecast to leadership?
  

Having better insight into each sales rep’s win rate and challenges, spending less time updating stale spreadsheets and less time preparing data for reviews gives you more time to coach your team and close more deals. 

How Salesforce Helps Create Accurate Forecasts

Efficient sales people and up-to-date sales data lead to more sales. Using Salesforce forecasting in Sales Cloud to create and monitor your forecasts gives you the tools to forecast with confidence, working with real-time data about your sales opportunities. 

Let’s look at a few of the ways that using the forecasting features in Salesforce can help improve your forecast accuracy and confidence. 

Work with real-time data. Your forecast is only as good as the data that feeds into it. Ensure that your sales team has a consistent, repeatable process for keeping opportunity information, such as owners, dates, and forecast categories up to date. With all your data in Salesforce, you can manage your forecasts in one place, directly where you work, and know that you’re analyzing live rollups with the most up-to-date information. As opportunities move through the sales cycle and forecasts change, adjust the forecast without changing the underlying opportunity data. 

Customize forecasts with what you need. Manage your forecasts around how your company does business. You choose which object contains the information that drives your forecast data and what quantity, revenue, and dates to use in forecast calculations. You also choose to forecast by user role or by territory. Each combination provides a different perspective and view into your business. The flexibility of Salesforce lets you build your own forecasts page with the components and data that sales leaders need, including external data used to analyze forecasts and custom metrics for reference. All the information that sales leaders need is in one place, without having to switch between systems. 

Visualize forecast changes and comparisons. A picture is worth a thousand words…or spreadsheets! Use built-in charts to see forecast changes within the current period and to compare this period’s forecast with the same time in previous periods. Charts save you from crunching numbers across columns to see if you’ll meet your target, taking your own screenshots to compare data, and adding data to another spreadsheet tab to flip through. 

Predict Even More Accurately with AI 

Add Einstein Forecasting, part of Sales Cloud Unlimited Edition or available with an add-on Sales Cloud Einstein license, to see AI-driven predictions for the current forecast period. Find areas to focus and intervene before teams miss their sales quota. 

Using Salesforce to generate and review forecasts gives you the confidence and flexibility to know your forecast is providing the most accurate picture about your business’ future. 

Resources 

• Salesforce: The Complete Guide to Building a Sales Forecast
• Salesforce Help: Salesforce Forecasting
• Trailhead: Sales Cloud Einstein