The Work-From-Home Sales Environment highlights the need for timely and accurate Sales Forecasts. The need to have accurate insights into the sales pipeline has never been more important but has also never been more difficult.
Gartner just issued a white paper on the need for new approaches to Sales Forecasting: “Use Sales Analytics to Improve Pipeline Management and Forecasting” by Steve Rietberg.
Here are the highlights of the changes Gartner sees as necessary:
Need to “increase sales leaders’ confidence in forecast analytics”
“… actionable metrics”
“…qualitative insights”
“…express deal progress in the CRM more consistently”
“…managers don’t receive the analytics they need to review their seller’s pipeline to effectively identify areas of risk and opportunity”
“Executive stakeholders frequently lack confidence in the pipeline data and forecast results”
A senior executive at Chorus.ai said TWICE during the call they did with ZoomInfo to announce their acquisition: “you have to be insane to count on the data in the CRM”.
Gartner reports that despite spending $156 per rep per month on CRM technology, sales leaders identified CRM/SFA effectiveness as well as pipeline management and forecasting among the top areas where sales operations are least effective.
“Only 45% say sales leaders have high confidence in forecasting accuracy. This skepticism can result in sales leaders acting on intuition instead of evidence.”
“…inconsistent data entry”
“…inconsistent pipeline data”
“Ensure Analytics and Forecasts are Credible to Executive Stakeholders by Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses?
Salesloft just announced their new product – “Forecast”.
Their 18-page white paper “The Future of Sales Forecasting” has a lot of insights: “Reframing Your Approach to Take Forecasting From Dread To Deals”.
Here are some of the highlights from their report:
“Your ability to understand how likely an opportunity is to close, identify risks, coach a seller through that process, and deliver an outcome (in a specific timeframe) are all attributes of the best sales leaders.”
“The forecast as part of your sales workflow can offer AI-based insight and show changes in real-time, like a prospect’s response to an email or insight from a conversation.”
Alternative
SalesTalk’s patent pending forecasting tool, Forecasting4U™ works during the call for AI-suggested changes to the planned presentation in response to prospect objections (or what they especially like).
SalesTalk tracks what is being discussed with 100% accuracy because the rep is just clicking on what they are discussing with the prospect during the call.
The rep is glad to do this simple click to record the subject of they are discussing because:
1. The system is tracking the actual time each point is discussed just by clicking the name of the discussion point.
2. The “Actual Time a Point is Discussed” is the best indicator of the prospect’s interest in that point.
3. Each time the subject changes, the point just discussed is written to the Story-So-Far and the Rules engine evaluates what it knew about the prospect when the call began, what has been learned so far (from the topics discussed and the time each was discussed) to update the Forecast fields in real time, i.e., SalesTalk is real time Activity based Sales Forecasting.
4. The Rules engine can even change the Playbook or Discussion Track that was automatically created, or AI generated at the beginning of the call.
What make Forecasting4U Different?
1. Effective Sales Behavior Modeling – Utilize objective probability to identify top performer behaviors.
2. Topic Tracking on Won Sales – Track the topics that top performers are consistently using.
3. Accurate Data Comparison – Compare close probabilities from reps versus the AI engine for more accurate sales forecasting.
Take the guesswork or “subjective forecasting” out of the equation and turn sales forecasting into an actionable, OBJECTIVE tool.