One very vital component for a CRM solution, and one which most often falls short, is forecasting. This is rather interesting because while other CRM functions are undoubtedly important—for example, a CRM would be useless without tracking opportunities—a company can no longer survive without accurate forecasting.
Why Forecasting?
This will become increasingly true as we move into the future. Why? Because competition only becomes more intense. To continually succeed, an enterprise will need the best forecasting system they can possibly obtain. You can no longer afford to be “approximate” with forecasts to miss the mark by 20 or 30 percent. You have to be dead on the money. I know many sales managers would argue with me, but right now would venture to say that most mid-level companies have very inaccurate forecasting systems.
It’s only when you truly know where you stand regarding sales figures, and where you’re most probably headed, that you are on safe ground and can manage sales with some certainty. Then when you have your sales meetings and set quotas, you’re able to know how each rep is performing and can drill down into each opportunity to get details where needed.
Minimizing Risk
What is the primary benefit you gain with accurate forecasting? You are minimizing risk factors for the company. And combining Forecasting with our other powerful new feature, Opportunity Fitness, opportunities can be leveraged like never before. You now have an overview of where the company should truly invest its time and resources.
In short, precise forecasting brings focus. As I’ve said many times, when you lose focus, you lose efficiency. When you lose efficiency, you lose productivity.
Forecasting Features
Different date ranges
You would expect to forecast for the whole company within a certain date range. But with Pipeliner’s Forecasting, you can set different forecasting date ranges for different sales teams or reps. You can even set forecasting ranges for various different product lines or categories.
This kind of precision is not available with many forecasting tools.
Reps, processes
Pipeliner Forecasting not only allows you to select one or more particular reps for forecasting. Many companies have different sales processes for different products or types of sales (new or repeat, for example). You can select which sales process or processes you want to include in your forecast for a particular rep or set of reps.
You can even select which fields to process as part of forecasting.
Accurate quotas
Now we come to setting quotas—another crucial part of forecasting. Setting inaccurate quotas only results in targets not being met, and the forecasts being missed. Pipeliner Forecasting does away with such inaccuracy.
If you had, for example, a yearly quota of $3 million to divide between two sales reps, you could divide the quota evenly, which would come out to $1.5 million per rep.
But as any sales manager knows, reps don’t all produce the same. Therefore, you can divide the quota by the reps, based on their historical average performance. You then might have one rep quota set at $2,267,074.46, and the other at $732,925.54, to add up to the $3 million quota.
Since this is a yearly quota, Pipeliner’s forecasting feature will divide the quota per rep up into 12 months, based on past average performance also—this time, per month.
Want to see the forecast by different types of performance, such as by ranking? You can rearrange your display to do so.
Accurate quotas per salesperson, based on historical performance, make sales management far easier.
Pipeline View, Chart View and List View
You can evaluate past performance data in an even different fashion. You can select particular users, or all users, and instantly create a line chart showing their performance month-by-month, or by any period of time, you wish. The chart can be by the sum for the period of time, or running sum which incrementally adds the later period’s total to the last.
If you want to drill down into a particular period, simply click on it and view the specific deals adding up to that period. Or, you can create a list view of the deals that add up to this amount and select any particular columns you want to see.
Additionally, we are the only CRM system available today to offer the pipeline view of these deals, showing where exactly they fall in the particular pipeline stages. This view can include a single rep, a group, or all.
Within a chart, you can filter to see only particular types of deals, products, sales, or any other qualifier you specify.
Therefore only Pipeliner CRM gives you the functionality for – “Instant dynamic visualization through collaborative forecasting!”
Can’t Be Done Without Pipeliner CRM
It’s fortunate that our CRM is as visual as it is, and given to the accuracy of data. Without the data is very reliable, this kind of forecasting would not be possible. This means, of course, that you won’t find this level of forecasting anywhere except with Pipeliner CRM.
Nothing Like It
As you’ll see when you put our forecasting feature to work, there is nothing like Pipeliner CRM anywhere. It is quite simply the industry’s most functional, usable, and powerful CRM.
Start Your Free, No-Obligation 14-Day Pipeliner CRM Cloud Unlimited Trial.
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