How to Create a Sales Forecast You Can Feel Confident About
It can’t be understated how important an accurate sales forecast is. Yet more and more revenue leaders are having a hard time getting it right.
Whether it’s dirty CRM data leading you astray, a lack of technology to track your sales goals, or a siloed team structure, there’s plenty of ways to sabotage your sales goals from the get-go.
Dooly has helped thousands of sales professionals build and maintain a winning sales process and crush their goals. Demo Dooly Now.
Read on to learn proven, practical strategies you can use to create a sales forecast you can feel good about presenting in 2022:
Knowing Your Goals & KPIs
There are dozens of models to choose from when building your sales forecast. It all depends on where your company is now, and where you want to be in the future.
For example, more established companies could have a goal of increasing ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), whereas a younger company might be interested in earning validation in the marketplace, placing their focus on more new logos instead of ARR.
Once you know what your goals are, invest in a trusted sales enablement tool to track and measure your team’s progress.
A tool like Dooly can help you identify potential pitfalls and opportunities in your team’s sales forecast. Let’s say you want to get bigger clients. With Dooly, you can create a custom Pipeline view that shows all your larger deals in progress in one place, and focus your attention on them.
Managers and reps alike don’t need to spend hours in Salesforce creating reports for pipeline review meetings. With Dooly, you’ll always have a pulse on your sales forecast, and be able to tie your teams’ actions back to your goals.
“I now can see my team’s pipeline and history of notes in a simple, user-friendly view, immediately update necessary fields, and pull high-level metrics on the fly.”
Cameron Kinney, Sales Manager @ Formstack
CRM Hygiene
The data you collect is only as good as the data your team puts in. With missing and/or inaccurate data in Salesforce, your entire forecast can be off.
But there’s a disconnect. Reps need to spend their time selling, not making sure their records and pipeline are up-to-date and accurate.
That’s why thousands of reps ditch the Salesforce view, and work directly in Dooly. With Dooly, reps can manage each deal and update their pipeline with one click — instantly syncing back to Salesforce.
Plus, managers can feel confident in their sales forecast. With Dooly’s Pipeline Editor, leaders have all the data they need to manage every deal from one centralized view.
With a clean, accurate, and up-to-date CRM, leaders have better visibility to manage expectations, set reasonable goals, and help the team win.
Internal Alignment
Since your sales forecast has implications for the entire company, every department has to be on the same page. As the leader in sales, it’s your responsibility to share findings with other departments to keep everyone headed for the same “North Star”.
It’s all but guaranteed that your forecast will ebb and flow throughout the year.
What if you discover that leads in a certain industry are very likely to become a customer, but have a high level of churn? The sales and CS team must be aligned and make changes to assure you’re going after the right leads for your business.
Or maybe you identify that some of your best-fit customers are companies with 100-200 employees. Marketing should adjust their campaigns accordingly, setting up your sales team with the best quality leads.
Dooly makes it extremely easy to share important insights with your team via Slack (or however your team communicates) so no one is left in the dark.
“The ability to share notes is great, we used to have information in multiple different places across one sales team, with dooly everyone is on the same page with up to date notes.”
Joseph Whitaker, Sales Engineer @ Procore
What's at Stake?
Your sales forecast comes into play for many key company decisions. It determines how many people to hire, where the budget should be allocated, the expected outcomes for nearly every department, and more.
When done right, sales teams achieve their goals, company revenue is predictable, and everybody wins. When done wrong, teams are left wondering what happened, why the projections were incorrect, excuses are made, teams blame each other, and a lack of trust can set your company up for failure.
Make sure your 2022 sales forecast is one you can feel confident about
Join the thousands of top-performing sales teams who use Dooly to drive predictable revenue and manage a winning, repeatable sales process. Speak with a product expert for a demo of Dooly now, and take control of your sales forecast.