Over the years, I’ve heard many people claim that Salesforce Forecasting is too basic, or that it isn’t needed in Salesforce as it’s done elsewhere. I repeatedly have the same conversations, asking the same questions: Do you want to be able to predict your revenue? Do you want to drive your sales team to close deals faster? Do you use Salesforce to track your opportunities?
If you answered “yes” to the questions above, and you are keeping track of your deals using opportunities, then forecasting is right for you. Let’s take a look in more detail.
Build and Enable
The first step in your forecasting journey is making sure you have a clearly defined sales process with approved forecast categories, success guidelines, and probabilities. Assuming you do, it is now time to build the right dashboards and reports so that your team can manage their business processes and forecast accurate revenue.
Review the types of reports your teams are using today to track opportunities in forecasts and explore ways for these to be modeled in Salesforce. Following this, build a plan to enable your teams – enabling teams to use the dashboards and reports listed below will result in a cleaner pipeline and better data for managers.
I would recommend running detailed enablement with the sales team in terms of their pipeline health, as well as teaching them how to clone reports and dashboards for running their own pipeline.
We know that having up-to-date CRM data is crucial to the business, and the sales team needs to feel licensed to manage their pipeline effectively.
Here are some sample forecasting learning objectives:
- Articulate the expectations for managing your opportunities.
- Review the Salesforce flow which contains guidance on the stages and expectations for close dates.
- Discuss and review expectations around each sales stage of an opportunity.
- Access a pipeline health dashboard – learn how to use this for your business.
- Access a close date dashboard – this shows you which deals are falling outside the guidance on close dates.
- Provide feedback.
Utilize and Monitor
The last stage in the forecasting journey is to have your managers use these resources consistently and ensure they are always prepared for any 1-2-1s, forecasting meetings, or general team performance discussions. Check in regularly to see where your teams may need additional support and ensure that your reporting continues to meet business needs.
I’ve grouped the reports under a suggested dashboard for your own configuration.
Create Dashboard: Pipeline Health
Report: Days in Stage
While it may be obvious that this tells you how long a deal has been sitting in a particular stage, it actually surfaces quite a lot of information about whether a deal is being forecast correctly.
If I were a sales manager looking at a deal that had been ‘stuck’ for a long time, I might ask the team member to lower the forecast category to something slightly more conservative than the deal stage is normally set at.
Bringing in more resources from the team to swarm around the opportunity may also help advance it. I might also ask the sales rep to close the deal as “lost” after a certain number of days if it hasn’t moved forward.
Tip: Set up Dynamic Dashboards to allow everyone to see which members of the team aren’t moving their deals through the sales process. Keep in mind that there is a limited number of dynamic dashboards per org, which should be checked beforehand.
Report: Average Age of Deal by Sales Team Member
This report would be used to analyze how long deals are sitting in the pipeline from initial qualification to closure/dead loss. Generally, you want to see a fairly balanced number across the team. It also helps to understand how fresh or stagnant deals are for each member of the team.
Salesforce has released Revenue Intelligence with a feature called Pipeline Inspection, which provides some really useful functionality that is worth considering.
Create Dashboard: Sales Team Accountability
Report: Closing in Next 14 Days With No Booked Meeting
This is one of my favorites and can, of course, be adjusted for your business. Using data in Salesforce, you can ensure that any deals about to close are getting meetings logged against them.
I recommend defining your version of a meeting and how it should be logged. I’d also warn that salespeople can sometimes try to add meetings (tasks/activities, etc.) to ensure that deals don’t appear on this report.
Tip: If you use a third-party integration like Calendly to book your meetings, be sure to test that all meeting types are captured in your report. Consider looking at solutions that automatically sync meetings and emails directly into Salesforce instead of relying on the team to do it themselves.
Report: No Activity in the Last 14 Days
For teams with large numbers of opportunities, this is an easy way to show which deals need to be worked for future contact. No activity can be determined in a few different ways for deals that are closing soon – perhaps this is a booked meeting (using meeting as a task type), or for more early-stage deals, it might be a logged email against the opportunity record.
Report: Missing Opportunity Data
I’ve worked with many clients where missing data on opportunities can directly influence how quickly a deal will close and if it is in the right forecast stage. Good examples of this include Missing Executive Sponsor (as an Opportunity Contact Role) – on later-stage deals or deals above a certain value.
For companies managing large enterprise opportunities, missing procurement team members could be another. Based on such a report, you could potentially consider other measures such as validation rules to ensure the data is added on time before the opportunity progresses to later stages.
Report: AE Next Step Field Left Blank
For every opportunity, I recommend having a field that contains a documented next step on a deal. Use this report to ensure your team is documenting (on every deal) exactly what is needed to move a deal through the sales process.
Report: No Follow-Up Booked in Salesforce
This is a slight variation of the logged meetings for companies, which requires the sales team to book future events – it identifies deals that do not have future meetings booked against them. I suggest sorting and grouping these both by opportunity value and with a record count by the sales team member.
Report: Number of Times the Close Dates Been Changed
In your opportunity list view, you can add the Push Count field – this shows the number of times an opportunity’s close date has been pushed out by a calendar month. For forecasting, this is a particularly good indicator of the health of an opportunity, as well as how well the sales team member is managing close dates on an opportunity.
Create Dashboard: Close Date Enforcement
Report: Future Close Dates
Close dates are extremely important when it comes to deal forecasting, and many companies have specific guidelines for close dates for each stage. I recommend creating this first, and then creating the reports to support each one of these rules and placing them in a singular dashboard.
For example, New Qualified Deals entering your pipeline should have a close date that never exceeds 60 days, and late-stage deals shouldn’t have close dates that exceed 14 days from today’s date.
I would recommend a report per sales stage. You can use this data to improve predictability of deal closure and get a better sense of timing (i.e. when deals will be moving in and out of your forecast). Some businesses might want to use a Salesforce Validation Rule here, but I would argue against it, as there can be exceptions on specific deals. I’d use reports to flag where these exceptions appear instead of enforcing the rule on the deal.
Report: Close Date in the Past
Ideally, you should never have any close dates in the past – ever! This happens frequently for companies with a high number of opportunities to manage per sales team member. First, look for opportunities with close dates in the past. I recommend grouping these by rep to identify who needs to update their opportunities.
Summary
Forecasting Dashboards and Reports are a powerful tool to create in Salesforce, but the hard work is getting the sales team to actually use them. Invest up front with your organization’s leaders, plus any revenue operations teams, to ensure that you are turning all data into actionable insight.
Join a team meeting to see how the reporting is being used, as well as what questions are being asked, and work 1-2-1 with team members who can give you feedback on what is needed for them to close more deals and report accurately on opportunity pipelines.
Comments: