Eliminate the Guesswork with Sales Forecasting: Part 1
Stop playing the guessing game!
Being able to predict the revenue of your organization is vital. An accurate revenue forecast allows for planning, focusing on the right aspects of your business, making informed strategic decisions, budgeting, and allocating resources appropriately, just to name a few. This, in turn, saves you time and money. One of the best new features included in the Dynamics 365 2020 Release Wave 1 is . Sales Forecasting enables you to make accurate predictions, eliminating the guesswork. In this 2 part blog series, we will discuss this cool new feature. Part 1 will focus on the basics of sales forecasting, as well as configuring sales forecasts. Part 2 will focus on viewing and analyzing sales forecasts.
Why use Sales Forecasting?
You might be asking yourself why not just use opportunities in Dynamics. Users have always been able to get a list of opportunities that are projected to close with an estimated close date, statuses, or stages in the process flow. Why do we need Sales Forecasting? Sales Forecasting is a more accurate way to project what is going to close and what you’re going to be selling. It’s a big picture view that allows organizations to plan production activities to meet future sales. has existed for a long time as a poorly adopted feature. With Goals, it is only possible to create one goal at a time, but with Sales Forecasting, many goals can easily be created at the same time.
To learn how the new forecast abilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales can improve sales forecasting accuracy, view the video from Microsoft below:
Who benefits from sales forecasting?
Bottoms-up forecasting is a projection of what a salesperson, team, or organization will sell in a given predetermined period of time.
Salespeople can track their performance against targets, identify pipeline risks that might jeopardize their ability to hit the targets and prevent deals from slipping away by identifying factors before it is too late. In addition, salespeople can review information about specific forecasts according to the forecast period (ie. fiscal year, month, quarter).
Sales Managers can track individual sales performance against quotas, to proactively provide coaching. This enables them to make informed business decisions.
In addition, sales directors and organization leaders can also benefit from this new feature.
- Directors can use forecast trends to anticipate departmental sales and reallocate resources if necessary.
- Organization leaders can use projected estimates to change product strategy or convey updated projections to investors.