Sales Forecast Method

Inaccurate sales forecasts can damage your long-term business decision making. A reliable sales forecasting method will aid in successful business growth, and prevent issues such as under performing reps and bulging pipelines.
What are the different sales forecasting methods that can provide accurate forecasting?

• Opportunity based – Each opportunity is given a status, or an opportunity stage. Itrepresents specific milestones that each opportunity should have crossed or touched, before being moved to the next stage
• Forecast based- This approach relies on sales reps to make a subjective assessment of the opportunities they’re working on. This forecast method is not quantitative or statistically-based
• Pipeline-based –This “bottom-up” approach takes into account all the opportunities in the pipeline. Every opportunity is thoroughly investigated for its chance to close-win
• Historical-based – This “top-down” approach takes into consideration the pipeline history to determine forecast for the next period. It looks at historical trends to predict sales

Sales forecasting methods help prioritize your rep efforts while purging the pipeline opportunities that are less likely to convert. This gives you complete visibility of your pipeline, and helps you focus on the right opportunities.
Get the InsightSquared Advantage
InsightSquared uses data-driven methodologies to derive insights,to accurately predict sales forecasts and improve sales performance. We provide the necessary reporting and review tools to work with your sales forecasting methods.
With InsightSquared, you get:

• Insight Feed – Get sources of new deals, events and notifications
• Activity Dashboard – Map actual sales to track employee performance and use their personal close rates on each stage
• Data Quality Dashboard – Fix data quality issues for accurate sales forecasts

To learn more about our ultimate sales forecast method, get our free guide to data-driven forecasting today.