That analogy may not bring a smile to many faces — after all in the past nine months, it is likely that both your sales forecast and your stock portfolio have gone the wrong direction. However, have you ever thought how much better you could manage your business if you could view your sales forecast the same way you view your stock chart? Hold that thought…
Have you ever heard these questions on a Monday sales forecast call?
- Why has the forecast changed?
- What came in? what fell out?
- What are the root-causes/trends in the forecast changes?
The typical response is a blank stare. It only further frustrates you to know there is an answer to these questions in the data – but you can’t get to it. If you had some way to understand why the forecast was changing and what trends were emerging from those changes, you could improve your results. Enter that stock chart analogy.
Right90 Change Analytics in action
Right90 Change Analytics provides the insight you need to answer those questions in seconds AND spot trends in the changing forecast that you may have never seen before. Let’s take a specific example and how you could use Change Analytics to better your quarterly results. Imagine you are managing a sales team of 50 sales reps, who sell thousands of products, to hundreds of customers, across a number of territories.
After a painful Excel roll-up process where your reps wasted four hours of valuable selling time updating the Excel forecast document, you find out that your forecast for Q2 has dropped from $200M to $120M. Your target is $165M! What do you do? You yell at your Sales Ops guy to go figure out what the heck has changed – and check those numbers! …and you start to dust off your resume.
Let’s change that scenario:
- Your sales reps spend 20 minutes to update their forecast — and they all do it
- The minute they updated their forecast, you see the complete sales forecast in a chart like the one above. It shows exactly how your forecast for Q2 has evolved over time. It shows how it dropped from $200M to $120M.
- Just like you might click on a stock-chart to see what news caused it to fall one day – you click on your sales forecast evolution chart to see what caused it to fall. The application tells you exactly what customers and products and users contributed to this change. It aggregates the data so you can see a trend.
- Ah Hah — there it is! The application tells you with one click that $70M of your forecast drop is due to one product in one region.
- AND you see why! — competitive price pressure.
You now have the insight you need to take action and fix the problem. Don’t go dust off that resume just yet… you can have the sales forecast insight you need in time to take action. Right90 has officially released Change Analytics.
Tags: CRM, forecasting, Sales