Guide
Jan 31, 2020
Xactly Forecast helps sales leaders and finance teams improve sales pipeline visibility, enhance seller performance, and gain early insight into commissions earnings.
According to CSO Insights, a staggering 67% of organizations lack a formalized approach to forecasting. Add to that poor data quality in CRMs, inconsistent sales execution across teams, and lack of intelligent technologies in place that ultimately leads to minimal pipeline visibility and low sales forecast confidence among sales and finance leaders.
That’s why we’re excited to bring the latest extension of our holistic SPM portfolio to the market. Below we detail four significant ways Xactly Forecast enhances the precision of sales forecast numbers and solves major concerns that have long impacted enterprise sales organizations.
1. Improve Sales Pipeline Visibility
A solid grip on pipeline metrics and selling activities matter to everyone in the sales organization. From a rep’s perspective, they need to know which deals are likely to close, and which have less of a chance of getting across the finish line so they can report this to their manager accurately (and predict how much money they’ll make in a given quarter!) That rep’s manager is calling the number for his entire team—usually based on the right combination of past experience, CRM data, and communication from their team. Go up another level to a VP of Sales or CSO, and they rely on the information they receive from their managers without much interaction with the individual deals.
Knowing that process and its lack of focus on data makes it abundantly clear why so many organizations struggle with pipeline accuracy and creating a sales forecast. With Xactly Forecast, sales leadership can closely monitor pipeline health in real-time. Visual pipeline dashboards give sales leaders the ability to clearly see growth, opportunity health, conversion metrics, and much more at a glance. Additionally, sales teams can also slice and dice the data the way they want to gain as micro or macro a view of opportunities and deal progression. They can even be alerted to at-risk deals, and spot high-potential opportunities otherwise lying unattended in the pipeline and slip their radar.
2. Boost Seller Productivity and Performance
Driving deals to close is a challenging task that requires a great deal of diligence and process to be followed. Everyone across the sales organization has their own methods, ideas, and experiences (or lack thereof). So it becomes hard to enforce consistency in sales process execution, e.g., did the rep assign deals to appropriate stages? Or was the contract sent to legal before being sent to the prospect? Xactly Forecast’s built-in machine learning observes pipeline activity patterns, changes over time, and much more to predict multiple risks that affect sales forecast accuracy while recommending ways to close the gap between commit and quota. It also frees up time for managers and reps to focus on strategy and 1:1 coaching to close deals faster quarter over quarter.
3. Increase Sales Forecast Accuracy
Gartner notes that only 45% of sales leaders and sellers have high confidence in their organization’s sales forecasting methods and accuracy. One of the main contributors to inaccurate forecasts is poor data quality. In fact, only 47% of respondents believe their organizations had high-quality data.
It’s an age-old sales issue—you want your sales reps to keep the CRM updated, but you don’t want to increase the burden of administrative work on reps or managers. Salespeople should be closing deals and not get caught up in the minutiae of deal data. But as a sales leader, to call your number confidently, it is crucial that you have ready access to relevant data to back your experience and intuition.
Xactly Forecast gives teams a simplified way to maintain CRM hygiene effortlessly. Powerful capabilities like intelligent data capture and timely action-oriented alerts enrich your CRM with relevant data resulting in a clean sales pipeline that gives you a real picture of how your organization is doing at any given time.
4. Gain Early Insight into Commission Earnings
Last, and certainly, not least, you'll have the opportunity to better predict future earnings with increased accuracy. Have your current commission plans locked? With Xactly Forecast, you can leverage your existing commission plans to model potential earnings based on different sales forecasts. Additionally, work better with your Finance teams by giving them deeper visibility into pipeline health and greater confidence in the sales forecast to continuously improve FP&A activities.
To delve deeper into Xactly Forecast, register to attend our upcoming webinar, "Intelligent Forecasting: Call Your Number With Confidence."
