Your business can’t afford to get your sales forecast wrong.
A sales forecast is more than a number in a spreadsheet or a data cell in a report. Your sales forecast determines what products and services you invest your money in. This number guides your investment in staff, determines budgets, and decides where you will advertise to fill your sales pipeline. This means you need the best sales forecasting tools to get a sales forecast right.
Sales forecasting solutions are critical for this reason. With the right programs, you can make better-informed decisions about spending your limited funds. You can also get granular information about the best investments you can make. The right sales forecasting tools can give you the financial clarity your business needs to make smart investments.
Real-Time Forecasting
Looking for useful data insights to inform your sales forecasting solutions? There are ways to do just that: You need a program to ensure your data is accurate up to the second. As such, your sales forecasting solutions must exist in real time.
Real-time forecasting was once considered the domain of the most technically advanced companies. Fortunately for you, any business can now access this type of forecast. That being said, it isn’t easy to combine all the data necessary for real-time forecasts. First, you must ensure that all departments of your operation speak to each other. Your team must report data to a single source and integrate the data into your CRM. Once your business has completed this step, you can make this information accessible to all necessary employees.
If your data operates around a central CRM, you’ll have to create customized software that meets your needs. Here’s the good news: There are many benefits of using custom software. For example, with the right sales forecasting tools, you can accelerate and standardize how you recognize revenue. From there, you can use the information to forecast data.
Prepare for All Eventualities
Do you know how your sales forecast will change if you lose your biggest account? If a major supplier goes out of business? If an account manager leaves to a competitor and takes all their accounts with them?
The key to business success is preparation. That’s why you need data tools that can plan for various scenarios. Appropriate scenario planning allows you to prepare for best-case or worst-case scenarios. Scenario planning enables you to figure out what will happen to your business if the unexpected occurs.
The prepared business can develop a plan and turn it into action. When your entire business has access to the right data, you can understand exactly what certain scenarios mean. With the proper plans, your business can be ready for anything.
Use the Best Data, Get the Best Data
Real-time forecasting and scenario planning have many things in common. Chief among them: the need for accurate and robust data. Indeed, when it comes to sales forecasting solutions, data is key. However, you must approach this data-centric viewpoint from two perspectives.
First, you have to consider data access. At Next Quarter, we believe the spreadsheet should go the way of the floppy disk. Instead, intuitive, AI-informed insights should take its place. Such a perspective enables you to de-silo information and share useful data points. This integrated operation gives you the sales forecast you need. Our program ensures all departments can access data in real-time. Doing so saves work and allows for AI-powered insights.
Next, you have to consider how your business will display that data. After all, you can have every data point in the world, but if you don’t report that data in a format that is easy to read and understand, it won’t do you any good. At Next Quarter, our sales forecasting tools can give you an in-depth, detailed perspective of every piece of revenue and every expense. You can use this information to provide granular views. Alternatively, you can zoom out for comprehensive overviews of your organization’s financial operations. Finally, you can use our dashboards to find key information and make presentations to your board, staff, or clients.
Partner With Next Quarter
Sales forecasting solutions provide predictability and certainty to your business. At Next Quarter, we’ve created sales forecasting tools to improve your forecasting models by over 97 percent. As one of the first AI-based account tools on the market, our platform integrates with Salesforce to provide you with an intuitive experience. Our founders—a former CFO and CRO—created Next Quarter to ensure you have every data point you need. We built this platform with profitability, predictability, and accuracy in mind. Ready to take your next steps and learn more about how our sales forecasting tools can grow your business? Contact us today to learn more about what Next Qua
