As CEO of InsightSquared, I am extremely excited to share that Mediafly, the leader in sales enablement, is acquiring InsightSquared, creating a world-class revenue intelligence and enablement experience for B2B teams. Having spent three decades in sales and marketing leadership roles and been fortunate to witness several significant disruptions driven by technology, I am convinced of three things: We are on the cusp of advancements that will change the game within the revenue functions of B2B companies. Activity and engagement analytics are the keys to assessing the health of a deal and the strength of the overall pipeline. There will…
Does your forecast process have room for improvement? Unsure where to start? Sales Forecasting informs every layer of your business, from individual revenue goals to the implementation team’s staffing strategy to product expansion. Confident in your forecast for growth? You can move fast when it comes to hiring and roadmap innovation. Unsure, decisions get much trickier.
According to the 2021 State of Sales Forecasting Report:
- 68% of participants missed their forecast by more than 10%
- 9 out of 10 reported missing their predicted forecast by 6% or more
- Only 52% acknowledged even measuring forecast accuracy
Suffice to say, there’s significant opportunity to improve overall forecast processes and results.
How do you Assess Forecast Accuracy?
So, how do you know where your company stands when it comes to forecasting? Are you best in class? Is your team working efficiently? And beyond the numbers, are there areas for improvement to your processes in order to boost output?
Enter the new Sales Forecast Benchmark Calculator
Using data-backed analytics, this easy-to-use tool processes KPIs from your existing business to create an analysis of your current forecast processes that you can use to guide you forward.
To start, the calculator examines the basic data points of your company — your past annual sales revenue, overall size and budget, and other defined attributes that position your business within the market.
We then delve into other KPIs and inputs, such as:
- your current forecast management process
- your satisfaction with those processes
- team structure and roles
- variables included
- performance
Based on the data from our State of Sales Forecasting Report, the Sales Forecast Benchmark Calculator will show your company’s comparative industry position. In a simple dashboard format, you can examine where you stand, and where you could improve your process in order to consolidate and correct your forecast.
Just where did we get all this insightful data? In partnership with RevOps Squared, we engaged with 400 B2B companies to understand how they manage the forecasting process, which lines of business are forecasted, how automation factors into forecasting, and to ultimately, establish benchmarks for forecast management accuracy, process, and performance.
All of this data feeds the outputs of our Forecast Benchmark Calculator to give you the most accurate picture of where you are and where you can go with your Sales Forecasting processes.
What are Forecasting Best Practices?
As evidenced in the 2021 Sales Forecasting Benchmarks, automation is one of the top ways companies can improve their forecast strategy. Yes we said it, say goodbye to Excel and spreadsheet forecasting.
With automated forecast management, teams eliminate hours of interrogations, and save Ops significant amounts of time trying to identify insights from spreadsheet-based analytics — an approach that simply cannot scale to meet data growth and evolving business needs.
Good forecasting requires both defined (ideally automated) processes and good qualitative judgment. But too often, both are applied inconsistently and without the data to back it up. In short, it’s time to use technology that eliminates the guesswork and creates a more accurate forecast.
Try the new Sales Forecast Calculator
We’d love for you to give this new Sales Forecast Calculator a try, and let us know your thoughts. Additionally if you’d like a Forecasting expert to take a look at your results and discuss opportunities to take it to the next level, simply contact our team and we’ll set up time.
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