Overview:

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform that stores sales data in real time, helping you as a sales representative to predict your company’s future needs and ensure its growth over time. With its ability to drive efficiency and provide users with integrated insights and analytics, Salesforce serves as an influential tool in day-to-day sales operations.  

What is Forecasting?

When it comes to sales, forecasting provides you with a projection of your team’s future sales, or in other words, which deals will be won and in what time frame. Becoming more and more pertinent as businesses grow and companies are founded, forecasting helps to define budgets and targets with the goal of driving sales teams to close deals faster and with more confidence.

What are Forecast Categories?

Forecast categories consist of five stages that correspond to a salesperson’s confidence that a particular deal will close successfully. Listed below, they are:

1. Pipeline: A deal placed in this category needs more development and fine-tuning before it can be closed successfully.

2. Best case: A deal placed in this category suggests a salesperson’s belief that it will close successfully.

3. Commit: A deal is moved to this category once a sales user commits to closing it.

4. Closed: A deal placed in this category has been closed won, or closed successfully

5. Omitted: A deal placed in this category has been closed lost or paused, and will be removed from the sales forecast.

Deals placed in any of these five stages contribute towards a sales forecast, which in turn predicts your company’s growth based on how well your team members drive their respective deals through the sales process. To visualize this process, we can draw on the many tools Salesforce has to offer and help to track your team’s progress on the road to success.

Impact:

This case study demonstrates the effectiveness of the tools provided in Salesforce to support sales teams as they work on deals placed in different forecast categories. Particularly with its Dynamic Dashboards and reports, Salesforce encourages a collaborative approach to closing deals, leading to improved accuracy in predicting future sales performance.

Challenge:

While in Salesforce, sales managers noticed a number of deals that had remained stagnant over extended periods of time. This led to:

• Difficulty in creating  both single and cumulative forecasts

• Inability to accurately align historical trends with present-day sales

• Decrease in the overall number of closed won deals for the company

Solution: 

To address these issues, our team helped sales managers to create and maintain Dynamic Dashboards in Salesforce. This allowed for more flexible decision-making; instead of simply closing a deal that had remained stagnant as “lost,” managers had the option of bringing in reinforcements from the team once they could view each member’s progress on their respective deals, resulting in sharper forecast accuracy.

Key Considerations: 

• Data and Report Visualization: With Dynamic Dashboards, sales teams can easily draw insights from various charts and graphs, comparing performance against targets and identifying areas needing attention. 

• Increased Forecast Accuracy: By providing real-time insights and identifying trends, Dynamic Dashboards present historical performance data alongside forecasts, allowing users to view critical pipeline metrics and adjust projections accordingly.

• Lower Push Count: Dynamic Dashboards help sales reps to easily identify how many times an opportunity’s close date has been pushed, prompting them to address deals that are paused and move them through the sales process. 

• Higher Number of Closed Won Deals: Once identified, “stuck” deals can move through the pipeline as reinforcements are brought in, resulting in more closed won deals as sales reps tailor their approach and prioritize resources within a set time frame.