Last updated on Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Aligning revenue forecasts with actuals can be a challenge. Organizations often find themselves grappling with discrepancies between expected revenue at the time of booking and the actual inflows after the deal is closed. Whether you’re dealing with consumption-based products, professional services, or manufactured goods, this gap can have a profound impact on your financial outlook.
That’s where revVana steps in—offering a powerful solution that not only helps you forecast before a deal is closed but also keeps your projections aligned with reality after the deal is won. With its comprehensive forecasting features, revVana empowers businesses to monitor revenue flows in real-time, ensuring your financial expectations stay accurate throughout the entire customer lifecycle all inside of Salesforce.
The difference between booked revenue and actual revenue post-sale is a common challenge. For many companies, forecasting relies heavily on static information available at the moment of booking—such as a dollar amount and a close date. But as every business knows, these initial projections often change.
Whether you’re shipping hardware, delivering professional services, or working with variable consumption products, delays, changes in customer needs, and evolving implementation schedules can all cause significant variations in the final revenue outcome.
Without a system to track these shifts, revenue projections can become inaccurate, leading to confusion and missed financial targets.
revVana’s features allow you to track forecasted revenue before a deal closes and then monitor how it shifts after the deal is won. By offering the ability to capture both live forecasts and snapshot views, revVana helps you manage and adjust revenue expectations over time. Here’s how it works:
Before a deal closes, revVana generates an automated revenue plan based on the information available at that time, such as products, services, or hardware tied to the opportunity. This plan includes not only expected revenue but also the timing of when that revenue will likely be realized. For example, hardware may be shipped immediately after the deal is signed, while other services or products may ramp up over time.
This initial plan helps you set realistic expectations and adjust them based on customer-specific factors, ensuring you have a solid forecast in place before the deal is closed.
Once the opportunity is moved to “Closed Won,” revVana automatically generates a snapshot of the forecast. This snapshot captures the revenue expectations at the time of booking, providing a baseline to compare against as the customer relationship evolves.
As your business delivers products or services, you can track how revenue actually materializes over time. The live plan updates in real-time, reflecting changes such as new hardware purchases, shifts in service timelines, or variations in consumption patterns.
One of revVana’s most powerful features is the ability to adapt your live plan based on real-world developments. For instance, if a customer decides to increase their order or delay hardware implementation, these adjustments can be reflected immediately in your live forecast. This ensures that your revenue projections are always up-to-date and aligned with the latest information.
These updates can be manually entered or integrated automatically from other data sources, such as Salesforce, giving you flexibility and precision in managing your forecasts.
See it in action:
The combination of live and snapshot views is key to understanding your revenue performance. By comparing the snapshot—what was expected at the time of booking—to the live plan, you can identify discrepancies early and take action. Are your customers overperforming or underperforming relative to expectations? What changes are driving these differences? These insights allow you to proactively manage customer relationships and forecast more accurately in the future.
With revVana’s forecasting capabilities, you can:
Inaccurate forecasts can lead to missed financial goals, strained customer relationships, and reduced confidence in your revenue operations. By using revVana to monitor both pre- and post-close revenue, you gain greater control over your financial outcomes.
With dynamic forecasting, real-time updates, and the ability to compare booked revenue to live performance, revVana helps you ensure that your revenue expectations are always grounded in reality.
Explore revVana’s capabilities today and start managing your revenue process with precision.
Revenue forecasting sits at the core of any growing SaaS or IaaS business. It’s how leadership plans investments, how teams prioritize resources, and how companies communicate confidence to investors. But for all its importance, revenue forecasting is often stitched together from disconnected spreadsheets, rigid CRM reports, and models that fail to adapt as the business evolves.
Revenue forecasting is a cornerstone in shaping a company’s future outlook and guiding essential business decisions. It influences both short-term and long-term goals, helping prepare the organization for the future. A well-structured forecast is pivotal for budgeting various aspects such as new hires, marketing campaigns, facilities, equipment, and research and development (R&D).
As businesses move deeper into the world of usage-based pricing, one of the most transformative changes is the shift in how revenue is forecasted. Gone are the days when revenue was purely driven by upfront contracts and renewals. In today’s environment, a significant portion of revenue comes from the ongoing consumption of products and services, which grows over time, especially through expansions.