The Problem
If you’re a public company, you understand the pressure to provide an accurate forecast to the market. If you’re a private company, perhaps the bank manager is your “market”. Pulling together the forecast on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis is often done by performing unnatural acts and endless excel spreadsheets.
It’s time to trash the excel spreadsheets and join companies who have a constant, 24/7 view into their forecast, watching it change and update on a minute by minute basis.
Technology is an enabler to this position, but it’s not the means to an end. Your sales team, including management and operations, are key to making this happen. You may have even installed a system to help automate the process, but you’re disappointed by the excel spreadsheets that still bounce around your email in-tray.
If your manual forecasting process is broken or not delivering what is needed, automating it will simply replicate the problem.
Where to Start?
Establishing a clearly defined sales process is your starting point. Bring together the sales and marketing teams. Have them jointly debate and challenge assumptions about buyer behaviour within your industry. If the exercise has worked well you should end up with a sales process you can map against a sales funnel which typically has marketing activities at the top followed by sales activities. These should be in-line with buyer behaviour.
Once you have a defined sales process, sales and marketing can rally around a commonly defined language. For example, when a sales person reports their sales stage as “Qualified Opportunity”, you will have established criteria to validate the sales person’s sales stage assignment.
Now For Predictability
Once you’ve established a common language for the business as a whole to rally around, you can begin to measure the progress and success of your marketing leads, sales team’s efforts and operation’s ability to deliver on the promises made.
Looking into the pipeline can now provide you with a level of insight, based on a commonly understood language across the business as a whole that you’ve not had before. Once you have access to this new level of information, you need to begin to think best about how to analyse it.
The following are some forms of analysis that would deliver a greater degree of insight.
Pipeline Analysis
Perform comprehensive analysis on your pipeline to identify opportunities and challenges.
Pipeline Quality Analysis
Evaluate the quality of your deals and identify key deals that can be targeted and closed quickly.
Team Pipeline Analysis
Perform comprehensive deal analysis by subordinate.
Historical Pipeline Analysis
Perform comprehensive historical analysis to evaluate current performance versus past expectations.
Historical Expected Revenue Quarterly Analysis
Compare historical expected revenue achievements against current achievements.
Top 5 Tips
To help your business develop greater certainty around your sales outcomes, the following 5 key points will be valuable.
- Understand your buyer behaviour. This is generally best gauged from your high performing sales members. You will also find value in talking with a sampling of your customers to validate your team’s assumptions.
- Bring your sales and marketing teams together to define a sales process.
- Map your buyer’s behaviour against the sales process.
- Determine what you need to measure. Think about capturing leading indicators to help you have increased confidence in your sales forecast.
- Finally, work on your reports. Our experience shows that reporting is often the last stage of a technological implementation.
Let’s Talk Today
To find out more, Click Here to contact a member of the CRMNow team today.
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