Last updated on Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Revenue forecasting is one of the most critical functions for any business, but too often, it’s built on unstable ground. Optimism in the pipeline, static spreadsheets, and siloed teams lead to forecasts that are reactive at best and misleading at worst.
RevOps teams are uniquely positioned to change that.
By evolving how forecasts are built, governed, and acted upon, RevOps can shift from reactive number reporting to a forward-looking, operationally integrated function. These four best practices outline how.
A common pitfall in revenue forecasting is equating the sales forecast with the revenue forecast. But those two are not interchangeable.
The sales forecast predicts when deals will close. A revenue forecast predicts when (and how) revenue will actually be recognized.
This distinction matters significantly for businesses with:
Best Practice:
Forecasting must account for the full revenue lifecycle. That means integrating data across Sales, Customer Success, Finance, and Delivery to model revenue realization across consumption, renewals, services, and time-based triggers. When your forecast reflects what’s actually earned (not just what’s sold) you gain a far more strategic view of your revenue engine.
Many organizations continue to rely on spreadsheets as their forecasting foundation. These tools, while flexible, introduce major challenges:
Spreadsheets were never designed to support dynamic, cross-functional forecasting at scale. And RevOps teams should not be spending time reconciling data and auditing formulas when they could be driving strategic insights.
Best Practice:
Transition to a centralized forecasting platform, ideally one embedded in your CRM environment, like Salesforce. A unified system ensures data integrity, streamlines collaboration, and eliminates the delays and risks inherent in manual processes. Most importantly, it frees RevOps teams to focus on what matters: scenario planning, trend analysis, and proactive optimization.
Looking at last quarter’s performance may explain where you’ve been, but it won’t help you anticipate what’s ahead.
Relying solely on historical data assumes static market conditions. It overlooks the realities of new competitors, economic shifts, changing sales cycles, and evolving customer behavior.
Best Practice:
Modern forecasting must be predictive. AI-driven models can assess thousands of variables in real time to simulate future revenue outcomes. These simulations allow you to understand the potential impact of early churn, delayed ramp-ups, or changes in renewal rates—before they happen. By layering scenario planning into your forecast process, you transform it from a report into a strategic decision-making tool.
Forecasting accuracy is directly tied to data quality. Inconsistent pipeline stages, missing opportunity fields, or misaligned delivery milestones all introduce noise into your models.
RevOps teams must lead the charge in establishing clean, governed, and structured data across the entire revenue lifecycle.
Best Practice:
Implement standardized data definitions and enforce disciplined entry across every department that contributes to revenue, from Sales and Marketing to Customer Success and Finance. Every opportunity, project, and contract should follow a defined path with clearly owned inputs. When your data foundation is strong, your forecast becomes not just more accurate, but more actionable.
The most effective revenue forecasts aren’t just more accurate, they’re more connected. They reflect the operational complexity of your business, anticipate risk, and serve as a centralized view into how revenue is actually created, consumed, and grown.
RevOps sits at the intersection of these moving parts. By adopting a unified, predictive, and data-driven approach, your team can elevate forecasting from an output to a core business capability.
revVana can help
Built natively on Salesforce, our AI-powered platform gives RevOps teams complete visibility into revenue across all models (pipeline, consumption, services, and renewals) without manual spreadsheets or disconnected tools.
Most teams think about pipeline in one way: new deals. What’s coming in, how much it’s worth, and how likely it is to close. That makes sense. But it’s not the full picture, especially for companies with usage-based pricing. For them, what happens after the deal is just as important. In fact, it often becomes a second pipeline. One that RevOps can’t afford to ignore.
Revenue Operations teams are facing increasing pressure to align engagement, operations, and forecasting in a way that’s not only efficient, but truly connected. In response, a new generation of technology is emerging: Revenue Orchestration Platforms (ROPs). These platforms are designed to unify critical revenue functions into a cohesive system, where frontline execution and operational intelligence move together in real time.
You hear it all the time, alignment, collaboration, visibility, but too often, Sales and Customer Success operate on different wavelengths. One’s focused on closing, the other on keeping customers happy. Forecasts stay fragmented. Handoffs get messy. And when revenue comes in lower than expected, it’s hard to pinpoint where things went sideways.