How Sales Forecasting Works

How do Sales leaders creating a working forecast? Sales forecasting is a projection of what your sales performance will be at the end of a specified period.
What are the methods that can help with accurate Sales Forecasting? For an accurate sales forecast, there are a few available methods:

• Opportunity stage forecasting– This stage represents specific mark that an opportunity should cross before it is pushed to the next stage
• Forecast stage- Sales rep make a subjective assessment of the opportunities in each stage and commits to convert them
• Pipeline based – Goes through each opportunity in the pipeline to assess their chance to close. Assessment is based on age in stage, opportunity value and selling effort spent on them
• Historical Based – An assessment of each opportunity based on regression model i.e. assessment is based on the last 12 months data

There are other advanced methods for sales forecasting that are based on the length of the sales cycle to adjust the expected value. How do you do this? You need to evaluate the age of each of your opportunities and compare it to the length of your sales cycle. This way, you can judge the likelihood of the closing time of an opportunity. You could also forecast using historical month or quarterly numbers or by weighing the opportunities currently in your pipeline.
Efficient Sales Forecasting – The InsightSquared Advantage
To work with the best sales forecasting methods and manage your pipeline efficiently, you need InsightSquared. Using our Sales forecasting methods you can identify early warning signals and risks in the sales pipeline. This helps you to tackle issues early and improve the overall performance of your reps.
InsightSquared offers the best data-driven sales forecasts based out of collated sales pipeline data. You can maximize the accuracy of your sales forecasts and ensure that your reps make the right business decisions.
We pull data from multiple sources to get a 360° view of your business and help you draw links between different data elements. You can go beyond lists and pivot tables to get deeper sales forecasting insights and apply filters to focus on the metrics that you most need.
Want to learn more about how sales forecasting works? Get our free guide on data-driven sales forecasting.