Tag Archives: best practices

Spotlight of the Week: Managing to the Exceptions

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Many forecast processes and systems lack the ability to view data at a high level and then drill down and diagnose specific problem areas in a way that lets you manage exceptions by customers, products or regions of your business.

The Right90 Analysis screen does just that through the use of a “breakdown panel”. To access the “breakdown panel”, just click on any numeric value on your main Right90 Analysis screen.

How can this help you save time? If a particular customer, product or region looks out of line, then just click on the number to get more detailed insight. You can continue to drill down to the lowest level of detail associated with the data available to the Right90 application.

Managing Exceptions in a Sales Forecast

Use Right90 to manage exceptions in your sales forecast.

Let’s look at the example to the right where we’re comparing the current forecast to actuals or shipments in Right90 for the year. You can quickly see that the shipments are 18% less than the forecast for the Americas region.

If you click on the total Americas revenue number listed in the table, the breakdown panel appears letting you know which areas within that region, product families and types of customers are responsible for the difference.

If you drill down yet another level on the customer type, then you can identify which specific accounts have contributed to the shortfall.

So, looking at higher level data and only drilling down to the detail when you need the specifics allows you to save time and focus on just the exceptions!

Right90 and the Sales 2.0 Alliance

Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Right90 Selcted for Sales 2.0 Alliance

Right90 is a founding member of the Sales 2.0 Alliance

We are excited to be a founding member of the Sales 2.0 Alliance. More and more, we are seeing market-leading companies make smart investments in technology and services to maximize sales performance and sales achievement. With Sales 2.0, we and our partners have a comprehensive suite of applications that give sales and marketing executives the power to get more done with the resources they have, get better visibility into how the sales engine is performing, manage risk and have a systematic way to measure and improve overall sales performance.

The Sales 2.0 collection of applications build on the foundation of today’s ubiquitous CRM systems to focus on the key business processes that drive higher revenue production, better margins, more revenue visibility and predictability that companies need and want to have best-in-class sales execution. Our goal is to equip sales people, sales executives and marketing departments with everything they need to deliver the best possible sales results. Working together as the leaders in the sales and marketing space, we (the members of the Sales 2.0 Alliance) are focused on helping sales departments be the best they can be, using state-of-the-art technology to minimize the time they spend on overhead and maximize the time they spend being effective and booking deals.

Sales 2.0 represents a focus on helping companies achieve best-in-class sales results. We at Right90 have always focused on maximizing the business value of technology. This announcement is just the beginning. Stay tuned!

Spotlight of the Week: Including Your Targets

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Sales teams always like to see “the score.”

In other words, how I am doing against my objectives or targets. This is why many of our Right90 customers load “target” data in Right90, so they can more easily keep track of their forecast compared to objectives for the year. Targets can be loaded at whatever level of detail is available and whatever makes the most sense for your organization.

For example, you can load the data by person, by product or by region. However, if your targets are only available by product, Right90 is flexible enough to allow you to omit the rest of the information and load only the targets by product.

Once you load your targets, you can compare them to your forecast based on the lowest common denominator between the two sets of data. Comparisons between the forecast and targets can be viewed in the following three helpful ways:

  • On the Right90 forecast screen as a reference point when you’re entering your forecast
  • Entering Data in Your Sales Forecast

    An interactive user interface allows you to capture data to address your targets.

  • Within the Right90 Change Analytics™ screen to get a graphical view of how the forecast is changing over time against the targets
  • View Sales Forecast Changes Over Time

    Right90 Changes Analytics displays a stock chart inspired view of your forecast changes.

  • Finally, on the Right90 Analyze tab for a high level snapshot comparisons where you can readily view details like the percent difference between the two data sets.
  • Detailed Drill Down in Sales Forecast Targets

    Compare your data sets for a detailed view of your sales forecast.

Including targets in Right90 is simple and it adds valuable insight for all your Right90 forecasters!

The Gold in Your Forecast

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

In two previous posts, I claimed that by segmenting your forecast and focusing your energy in the right areas, you can increase revenues and forecast accuracy while decreasing inventory. Does that sound too good to be true? Are you skeptical of this claim… as skeptical as you are about your forecast? After all, how much good can you do if you spend more time on a specific customer than another? Or could you increase your revenue if you spent more time with a particular sales rep than another?

I aim to prove, with real life examples, that you can.

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