Tag Archives: Best Practices

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Spotlight of the Week: A Simple Way to Evaluate the Quality of Your Forecast

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Measuring forecast accuracy is one of the most popular ways to measure the quality of your forecast.  However, we’d like to suggest some other simple but very valuable analyses you can do to help build confidence in your forecast data.  At a minimum, knowing when the forecast was last updated will give you an indication as to how good the data is.  We’re not talking about the date the forecast was “due” to be updated by the sales team but rather the last time a particular opportunity changed. This is one way our customers determine how complete their forecast is.

On the Right90 Forecast screen, there are two key “viewable” fields that help you understand if your forecast is complete:

  • “Last forecasted date” field tells you when the quantity or price for that particular line item was last forecasted
  • “Last updated field” tells you when anything else associated with that line item was updated (i.e. the stage of the opportunity, market application, or other custom fields you have set up).

Before analyzing “last forecasted data” results, we have two more tips for streamlining your view and maximizing the functionality available in the Next Generation Forecaster. First, when you have your forecast data on one page in Right90, filter out zero revenue rows to reduce the amount of unnecessary data. Try filtering revenue greater than zero for just the current month. Then, sort by clicking on the “last forecasted date” column header to bring the older items to the top so that you can focus on items that may not be up to date.

Obtain a quality sales forecast using filtersIn the example to the right, you can clearly see that quantity and price forecast updates were made in January 2010.

As both a forecaster and a manager, reviewing when the forecast was last changed helps you quickly spot areas that may need a second look.  Catching outdated information along the way will help build confidence in your forecast data and improve your forecast accuracy.  Have you used these techniques to evaluate the quality of your forecast, or do you have another favorite technique to share?

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Right90 Signs Up Its First Channel Partner

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Recently, Right90 and Astadia announced that Astadia would resell the Right90 sales forecasting solution into the midmarket. I am very excited about this announcement and its significance on several levels:

First and foremost, it is a natural extension of a partnership that has been close for years. Astadia and Right90 have jointly won and implemented many successful sales forecasting solutions since our first joint account almost 4 years ago. Together, we have established a track record of customer success and value delivery. Formalizing this reseller agreement is just another step towards equipping Astadia to deliver what customers and prospects want:  sales forecasting integrated with the other technology components of the end-to-end solutions they are building for sales and marketing.

Astadia’s understanding of how to integrate technology and business processes, coupled with a deep knowledge of the high tech marketplace and associated company best practices, all woven together by high quality project management and a deep concern about setting the customer up for success, has been a formula for high customer loyalty and successful implementations. We could not have chosen a better company to be our first channel partner.

Looking a little bit deeper, this announcement is significant because it’s the first time Right90 will be using distribution to expand the availability and reach of its products. We have always seen a demand for sales forecasting that ranges from small companies to large — from the tactical streamlining of the sales forecast capture process driven by Sales Ops to strategic sales forecasting improvement initiatives driven by the CEO. With this new reach, we will start to be able to address more of the different needs of the marketplace and be able to offer solutions that are more tailored to the different requirements and audiences.

At its heart, this announcement is significant because it is a sign of our maturity as a company and represents a big step forward in our growth. Our business has always changed over the years, but this is a major evolution of how we sell and how we go to market. In parallel, we are expanding our other sales and marketing efforts and pushing into new strategic partnerships and strategic alliances. 2010 is going to be a very interesting year!

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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!

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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!

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