Adjust Sales Projections in Salesforce Forecasting

Learning Objectives

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

• Explain how Salesforce Forecasting fits into the Revenue Intelligence workflow.
  
• Use Salesforce Forecasting as a source of truth for top-down and bottoms-up adjustments to your pipeline.
  

You’ve already inspected your pipeline to gain insights, close deals, and assess performance. Now, it’s time to ensure your forecast aligns with those insights so you can present an accurate outlook to your sales leaders for this quarter.

Work with Your Team to Forecast Outcomes

Salesforce Forecasting 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 Haven Enterprises team has opportunity stages mapped to a forecast category—these indicate how likely a given deal is to close.

Then you 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 Salesforce Forecasting to look at your pipeline forecast, 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 used Revenue Insights to get a high-level overview of KPIs that told you which areas to focus on. In addition, you could see your team’s performance to pinpoint areas for coaching.

Moving into Pipeline Inspection, you worked with your team to address some issues that brought down sales numbers. Your team members were able to adjust their predicted sales. You inspected the pipeline and were 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 your team members, you returned to the Forecasts tab to adjust the overall forecast numbers so that you can confidently present the collective team forecasts to your leadership team.

Resources 

• Salesforce Help: Salesforce Forecasting
• Salesforce Help: Turn On Salesforce Forecasting and Define Forecasts Settings