Sales Forecasting

What does your team’s forecasting process look like?


Corp and frankly all of us love to poke fun at commits, upsides, and forecasts in general. It’s because the process is broken and outdated.


Rather than plugging forecasting software, I’m curious about how teams managers and sales execs are running forecasts.


How much micromanagement does the forecasting process cause?


How accurate do you think YOUR forecast is and how accurate is your team’s?


I’d love to hear thoughts, complaints, ideas, and tips for forecasting.

👑 Sales Strategy
☁️ Software Tech
🎱 Sales Forecast
4
CoorsKing
WR Officer
3
Retired King of the Coors Knights
Reps roll forecast to ADs every Monday. ADs roll to RVPs Monday afternoon. RVPs roll to CRO & President on Wednesday I think?

We use Clari which seems to work fine but is hard for new hires to learn if they have not used it before. 

We have WAY too many categories though... management decided "low, forecast, high" was not enough so now we have:
"Commit, low, forecast, forecast risk, best case, high" - something like that, new change so I am still learning which one is which 

Like WTF how the hell do I decide which bucket to use???
MoonDog349
Valued Contributor
0
Sales Manager
Clari is a competitor of mine but we don't exclusively sell forecasting tools. Are you rolling the forecasts to your AD's weekly in Clari? If not, how?
CoorsKing
WR Officer
2
Retired King of the Coors Knights
Yeah through Clari
MoonDog349
Valued Contributor
0
Sales Manager
How big is your sales team? Do you think the forecasts reflect what's actually going on?
CoorsKing
WR Officer
2
Retired King of the Coors Knights
My individual team has 20, total reps at the company are roughly 900. We seem to be pretty accurate with forecasts actually, at least we were until they added the extra BS categories. Our team was always +/- 5%
MoonDog349
Valued Contributor
0
Sales Manager
That has to be much better than average. Do you sell software?
Chep
WR Officer
1
Bitcoin Adoption Specialist
As an S.D.R I usually don't spend a lot of time forecasting because our management would rather deal with that and have me make cold calls which I'm grateful for
MoonDog349
Valued Contributor
1
Sales Manager
I remember as an SDR I was sometimes asked to forecast the number of meetings I was expected to pulling in a month. Upside and all! But this makes sense. 
CuriousFox
WR Officer
1
🦊
Forecast in Salesforce and we have calls about it every day at 8. It's all a damn game between pipeline, best case, and commit. 
MoonDog349
Valued Contributor
1
Sales Manager
When you say in sfdc, do mean just opening a report of all the opps and seeing which categories they are in? Or do you all have some kind of dashboard built? Also... everyday?! fuck
CuriousFox
WR Officer
1
🦊
Yes it's a dashboard and yes it's freaking overkill. 
BossBitch
Politicker
1
Account Executive
My compny seems to be a little more lax than some on here. Have a monthly call each month and a quarterly call and that's it. In the monthly call we go over the forecast for the month. On the quarterly we each have to present our own QBR going through the last quarter as well as the quarter to come, everything from C/L to all the deals in different stages that are in the pipe for that month. 
MoonDog349
Valued Contributor
0
Sales Manager
What % of you all are hitting quota? Is the sales team as a whole hitting it's numbers? Annually?
BossBitch
Politicker
0
Account Executive
Last year, I was one of 2 😬 However, this year is much better
Salespreuner
Big Shot
0
Regional Sales Director
SFDC for forecasting and then calls around it
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