Accenture and CSO Insights claim that business-to-business sales productivity rates have dropped down to 33%, and 30-60% of intermediate sales professionals aren’t able to meet their sales targets.
Today, business-to-business sales productivity is the main challenge for organizations that struggle hard to meet the demands of increasing their revenue and Cost of Sales (COS) targets. And the result of missing a sales forecast can easily and quickly undermine public markets’ and employee confidence in a company, having a negative impact on customer loyalty.
Therefore, companies need professional sales forecasting tools to help them build the most accurate forecasts.
Today, there is a great number of specialized sales software, which allows making correct and timely decisions using the existing scenarios for the development of certain business processes of the company and increasing its profits.
1. What is sales forecasting?
Sales forecasting is the practice of estimating a company’s future revenue by predicting the amount of products or/and services a sales representative (the team, or the entire company) will be able to sell in the nearest future (in a week, month, quarter, or year).
In other words, sales forecasting is nothing but an estimated measure of a market response to an organization’s go-to-market efforts.
2. Why is sales forecasting important?
- helps companies make better business decisions;
- allows to more effectively allocate resources for business growth;
- helps sales reps achieve their goals by analyzing early warning signals in the sales pipeline and take measures in time;
- allows companies to accurately estimate their costs and revenue and drive better short-term and long-term business performance;
- helps to predict and plan for demand;
- allows to making wise investments;
- helps to improve the entire sales process;
- assists in improving company morale;
3. What is a Sales Forecasting Software?
Sales Forecasting software provides a set of tools designed to help organizations plan, budget, and forecast costs and revenue with the help of cutting-edge modeling and analysis functionality.
It analyses a company’s sales activity and historical data and helps to predict sales revenues for a certain time period.
Forecasting software helps to make the whole sales forecasting process more robust and standardized by implementing a scientific approach. The software successfully integrates into the existing CRM, and sales activity data, auto-captured from emails, calls, SMS, etc. is the basis for the analysis.
Today there are a lot of sales forecasting solutions with their own advantages and disadvantages. Some of these services will suit you more, and some — less. But there are well-established universal solutions, such as, for example, Revenue Grid platform.
Revenue Grid is a Salesforce-native AI-powered Guided Selling platform that provides sales teams with step-by-step guidance to win key deals using full sales data, and your proven strategy and expertise.
Revenue grid helps your sales teams to:
- gain complete visibility into the pipeline by knowing the status of every deal (44% more data in Salesforce);
- control the sales process by influencing how deals move through the stages and improve the process across the whole org (37% improved velocity);
- and guide your sales reps to closed won by receiving signals to push deals forward and act fast to keep things on track (25% higher closed won ratio).
Revenue Grid provides three features for the best results:
- Revenue Engage: the most intelligent automated nurturing tool for Salesforce allows you to get 10x the engagement with the same team
- Revenue Inbox: #1 Salesforce and Email & Calendar integration that automates real-time data capture from all communication channels to get more pipeline and grow revenue
- Revenue Guide: a guided selling solution that works natively with Salesforce and allows you to align your revenue-generating teams around a unified selling approach. Implement tactics, follow plays, increase closed won ratio.
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