Revenue Projections
Salesforce Revenue Forecasting
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Automate Salesforce Revenue Forecasting With revVana
Does your team rely on spreadsheets and handwritten notes to track revenue forecasts? Are you relying on a single person to keep track of those documents and update them on a regular basis? This highly inefficient system is not only time consuming, but also likely to be inaccurate.
With Salesforce, you have collaborative opportunity forecasting that allows sales teams to share data with the forecasting manager in real-time. Within Salesforce, customizable forecasting also allows users to create custom fields, change their forecast settings, and customize forecast categories as needed for each revenue forecast.
On the native Salesforce Sales Cloud forecasts page, you’ll also find forecast amounts based on the totals and subtotal of opportunities in the four categories based on the opportunity stage: pipeline, best case, commit, and closed. Granular data control allows you to see reports based on role hierarchy, forecast currency, and more.
However, how do these sales forecasts translate to revenue forecasts? If your sales manager or revenue forecasting team has to manually create revenue forecasts and reports, your business may suffer because of process inefficiencies. How can you take what Salesforce.com offers for sales forecasting and make it even better for revenue forecasting for your sales and finance organizations?
That’s simple. revVana.
With revVana Plan, you can translate forecasts in your pipeline and closed opportunities into forecasts of revenue streams – automatically. Create forecasts at any sales level from your CRM data. Set rules for how and when to create and recreate forecasts based on actual account revenues and sales stages.
Your account teams will be able to manage and change revenue over time and generate forecast data based on any criteria they want – automatically. Automating the reporting process saves time and keeps data current, improving the accuracy and reliability of forecasts over time to provide better insights.
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Common Revenue Forecasting Problems
Your revenue forecast is likely the most important indicator of your business’s health and performance. Accuracy makes it easier to anticipate changes in revenue, helps align costs with income, and brings things that require attention to the forefront.
As important as this is to business success, the data shows that more than half of companies find that fewer than 75% of sales close as they are forecasted. This means that while they are spending time on forecasting – the approach they use is all wrong. In most cases, they don’t have the right forecasting tools to get the job done.
Is your company making any of these mistakes?
Relying on Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are a quick and easy way to track data – but they are majorly flawed. Because they only reflect a snapshot in time, they will be out of date by the time you use them to build a forecast. Unless you’re working on the spreadsheet from the cloud, it’s also likely you’ll end up with multiple versions of the same file, with each person working from different numbers.
Ultimately, relying on spreadsheets is time-consuming, isn’t conducive to collaboration, and creates chaos within the business where clarity is essential. Moving away from spreadsheets means your sales team can focus more time and effort on generating leads and closing sales and less time tweaking formulas and cell data.
Ignoring Historical Data
Unless your company is so new there is no data to work with, or you’re launching a massive different product or service, your past performance data is the best predictor of your future. Existing data shows you conversion rates, the time it takes to make a sale, and more. As you forecast the next period, you can use these indicators to get a fairly accurate idea about what you can expect in terms of sales. If you find your forecast diverting from your history, there must be a reason behind it – a significant change somewhere along the way.
Staying Stagnant
Regardless of how often you forecast, traditional forecasts go out of date quickly. A one-month-old static forecast ignores recent changes in circumstances and additional information that may affect the outcome.
To combat this, your forecast tool needs to be both real-time and collaborative so you can see the vital signs as they are in the moment and make adjustments as necessary. This way, no matter when you decide to hold a forecast meeting, you know you can make decisions with confidence.
Analysis Paralysis
In reality, if you’re relying on manual processes with multiple separate sources of data, you’ll spend more time trying to make sense of what’s in front of you. Forecasting will become such a chore that it won’t be done often, and if it gets done, it’s not likely to be accurate. Eliminating manual processes that rely on snapshots of data in favor of automated forecasting makes the data more accessible which then makes it easier to glean insights.
If you answered yes to at least one of these common revenue forecasting mistakes – then it’s time to step back and reevaluate your process.
Here at revVana, we have everything you need to leverage your Salesforce CRM data into actionable and precise revenue forecasts, helping you maximize revenue – automatically.
Get in touch with our team today
