How to Enhance Sales Forecasting | Online CRM Software
How to Enhance Sales Forecasting?
Sales forecasting is one of the most
essential and crucial parts of your business. The accuracy of your sales
forecasts affects your business in many ways, right from the minor to major
decisions that may build the future of the business itself. In a layman
language, putting things into perspective is known as sales forecasting. It
empowers organizations to predict upcoming possible sales opportunities and
sales challenges in building and managing the sales pipeline. Here online CRM
software plays a major role by making the process of sales forecasting easy. In
a nutshell, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system helps in the process
of sales forecasting that enables businesses to take the necessary steps and
implement appropriate sales strategies to predict the most promising sales
numbers. Let’s see what other measures businesses must keep enhancing the
accuracy of sales forecasting.
Stop
Guessing:
Undoubtedly online CRM software eases the job of sales forecasting however one
more aspect that businesses should consider while sales forecasting is saying
no to guesswork. Senior managers of any business should plan their sales
forecast on the basis of their leads’ buying tendencies and timetable. They
should plan their sales forecast based on the leads’ responses on the possible
purchase date. After knowing the promising leads’ buying timetable, businesses
can plan their sales forecasts accurately.
Keep
Real Prospects: Another aspect apart from the implementation of
online CRM software that should be kept in mind while sales forecasting is
keeping the real prospects only. We all know with the pace of time as the leads
get old, it becomes tougher to convert them into customers. Hence, it is
necessary to keep only real prospects and try not to add old sales
opportunities in the sales forecasting procedure. The process of your sales
forecasting will be more accurate as you start adding real prospects that are
not stagnant in your sales pipeline.
Delete
Old Prospects: Yes, online CRM software offers great help in
automating your lead management process that automatically improves the sales
forecasting process. However, the efficiency of CRM will decrease if you are
old prospects in a procedure of sales forecasting. Every lead has a turnaround
time, once it goes beyond that timeframe the chances of that leads converting
into a client also goes low. So, it would be a wise step to completely delete
old prospects from your sales pipeline and not consider them while sales
forecasting.
Classify
the Sales Process: If you wish to enhance the process of
your sales forecasting, you have to classify your time and the sales process to
manage the sales pipeline effectively. While forecasting the sales you should
you should have a clear picture of your sales process. Your sales executive
should have a single goal in their mind and transparency of their actions
should be in the sales team. Seamless communication among the sales team
members is highly required to enhance the accuracy in your sales forecasting
process.
Coordinate with the Marketing Department: As we are aware that online CRM software enables sales and marketing departments to establish perfect alignment among them. Similarly, it is highly required by the sales team to coordinate with the marketing team while planning the sales forecast. The sales team should know how the marketing team works and what sort of leads are coming from there. A recent survey by MarketingProfs states that if the alignment between the sales and marketing team is perfect then it results in 37% higher sales win rates with 35% higher customer retention rates. Hence, the perfect alignment between the sales and marketing team is highly required for accurate sales forecasting.
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