Yan shares three ways to improve sales forecasts: build a data culture where reps log everything in Salesforce, establish a consistent process with aligned KPIs and a defined cadence, and use Sales Cloud tools like collaborative forecasting and Einstein Conversation Insights to inspect pipeline health and coach teams.
How's it going everyone? I'm Yan. Today we're talking about sales forecasting. We'll discuss what forecasting is, why accurate and real time forecasting is important, and three tips to consider when building out your forecasting strategies with examples of how we do it here at Salesforce. If that sounds good to you, let's get right into it. Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce, an inside look at our sales, service, marketing and IT businesses with helpful how to tips you can use for your business. For sales professionals, we'll have tips that can help businesses save on costs with automation, be more efficient with productivity tools, and so much more. As always, you can continue learning on Trailhead, Salesforce's online learning platform for more information on this topic and many others you might find useful for your business. Now onto sales forecasting. Sales forecasting can be defined as a projection of future revenue and a prediction of which deals will move through the sales cycle. Accurate forecasting ensures that everyone is on the same page rowing toward the same goal, which helps all levels of the organization be more effective and strategic with their time. Every company has a different way of managing their pipeline and preparing sales forecasts. At Salesforce, we've broken it down into three key components People, process and tools. That might sound easy, but it's really not a simple recipe for success. All three elements people, process and tools need to work well together to create a data driven culture which will improve your forecast accuracy. Now here are three tips you can use to foster a data culture and maximize the impact of your sales forecasts. Tip Number one Create a data culture Selling is a team sport. Every member of the sales organization plays an important role when it comes to forecasting because every team member has unique, unique insights into the likelihood that that particular deal will close. At Salesforce, every member of the sales organization, from the sales rep to the C suite, helps put together our forecasts. We abide by our golden rule. If it isn't in Salesforce, it doesn't exist. Every sales rep and every manager is held accountable. The account executives identify, create and and adjust opportunity data in a timely manner. Sales managers are responsible for inspecting this data, monitoring pipeline changes and adding their own judgment and commits. Executives further inspect sales manager commits, investigate trends, and ultimately redirect resources and guide action to address gaps if any one of these individual fails to do their part. Forecast reviews are inefficient and inaccurate since they're based on stale data. Involving each level of the sales organization in this process ensures we're approaching our forecast from both A bottoms up and a tops down perspective. Develop a consistent, transparent process to prepare an accurate forecast, an organization first needs to carefully define and align on the metrics that are most important to the health of the business. Because Salesforce is a subscription based business, we measure pipeline generation, annual contract value or bookings, recurring revenue and attrition. Of course, the metrics that work for our business don't necessarily work for yours. So start by agreeing on the measures that affect your your business's outcomes. But don't stop at defining your KPIs. It's also important to align on the critical components of your opportunity data. This could include everything from deal stages to the required inputs from each sales rep. For example, at Salesforce we require every opportunity to include close dates, amounts, deal stage, a sales manager judgment, next steps and an up to date log of activities. Once you have your definitions and rules in place, it's time to design your forecasting cadence. Now, would you believe me if I told you that we have a forecasting call at Salesforce every single day of the week? Well, it's true. Let me break it down. On Monday mornings, our CEO and COO start with a review of week over week changes, the quarterly outlook and and influential deals. Each day the forecast is reviewed at a different level. From region and country managers to industry managers to individual territory managers. And all along the way, sales reps are taking action and updating their pipeline data. Remember the golden Rule from the CEO down, Salesforce aligns sales teams with priority processes designed to keep us on track with our goals. And because everyone understands the goals, we're all working toward them. Weekly cadences feed into our monthly which in turn helps guide the quarterly, biannual and yearly cadences driving alignment throughout the entire process. Tip number three Use the right tools for the job. Now this is the last piece of the puzzle and it's critical to the success of bringing the people and the process together. Remember, if it isn't in Salesforce, it doesn't exist. So you guessed it. Every element of our forecasting process happens in Salesforce. Everything starts in sales cloud. As I alluded to before, the entire process starts with a rep or creating an opportunity. Reps and managers can make adjustments in real time from anywhere to ensure accuracy. These opportunities are rolled up by collaborative forecasting to show expected sales by team, time period or product, family and territory. From there, the sales manager uses pipeline inspection to inspect pipeline health. With pipeline inspection, our reps and managers can quickly see recent changes to opportunity amounts, close dates, AI based opportunity scores and more. It also integrates with Einstein Conversation Insights, where managers can listen to call recordings to understand where a deal went sideways. Tools like pipeline inspection help to facilitate sales coaching moments. Managers can quickly identify gaps and help the rep create an action plan to hit their number. Once the pipeline has gone through manager inspection, it's ready for the Monday Executive forecast call. This is where powerful tools like CRM analytics come into play. CRM analytics is a Salesforce native analytics platform that allows us to connect data from across the organization and and visualize it in a single view for our sales teams to consume. One of our most commonly used analytics dashboards is our Global Forecast Dashboard. Here the sales organization can get a bird's eye view of every important sales metric and for deeper dives. Filters are available for time periods, specific sales leaders, customer segments, and more. The dashboard is color coded, intentionally designed to call attention to the most impactful changes. Here, sales teams review commits, bookings or acv year over year trends, pipeline coverage, and much, much more. And because CRM analytics is native to Salesforce, users can drill down and take action with a single click of a button directly from the dashboard. This all comes together to create a single source of truth for pipeline and forecasting. Every aspect of the pipeline starts with the opportunity, goes through manager inspection and commitment, and ultimately rolls up to the CRO as part of a global forecasting dashboard. It's a centralized place for your sales teams, from reps to managers to the C Suite, to focus on what's working, where sales reps can boost our productivity, and where teams can make the sales process more efficient. Well, there you have it. Three ways to help you build an accurate forecast for your business. Check out our additional resources and be sure to watch the other episodes in this series to learn how we use Salesforce products to deliver exceptional selling experiences. We'll see you next time. Sam.
