Driving an Actionable Sales Forecast

A key step in driving an actionable sales forecast is ensuring that you’re collecting the forecast from all your sales reps across all your accounts in a timely fashion.

The reality is that providing the sales forecast tends to be a tedious, error-prone process. Sales reps spend too much time entering their forecast, or they don't do it at all. Sales operations and management spend a lot of time chasing down the latest forecast numbers and consolidating, rather than vetting and acting on the sales forecast.

And, because each department forecasts differently (e.g. marketing forecasts by product, sales by account or opportunity), the finance, marketing, operations and sales teams have a hard time understanding the variance between their forecast and the other departments' forecast. As a result, getting commitment to a single forecast plan can be a challenge.

Right90 Sales Forecast Capture

Right90 Sales Forecast Capture™ is built to ensure that you are collecting the most complete forecast in as timely a fashion as possible. The application ultimately drives adoption of the forecast process by providing an intuitive interface for entering the forecast, with flexibility for capturing and rolling up multiple forecast plans at any level of detail, so that each forecast plan can be digested by sales, marketing, operations and finance.

By leveraging Sales Forecast Capture, one customer saw forecast adoption go from 25% (where only team leads were providing the forecast and had to "guesstimate" their rep forecasts) to 100% (sales reps were now directly providing the sales forecast). Another customer reduced its forecast cycle times by 60%, while yet another saw the amount of time sales reps spent entering their forecast per week drop from 4-5 hours to an hour or less.

Right90 Sales Forecast Capture screen

Key Benefits:
For Sales Reps	Increased sales effectiveness Less time entering forecast, more time selling
For Sales Management	Real-time visibility, increased forecast completeness and accuracy Real-time views of the forecast so that sales execution can be course-corrected as needed More time understanding variances in forecast, less time “chasing down” the latest forecast numbers Hold sales reps accountable for the sales forecast accuracy.
For Sales Operations	Real-time visibility, increased forecast completeness and accuracy Less time putting together forecast roll-ups and snapshots, more time to focus on underlying forecast variance and corrective action More confidence when communicating the forecast across different parts of the organization.
For the Entire Organization	Real-time visibility, increased forecast completeness and accuracy A single forecasting tool with the flexibility to allow different departments to forecast from their own perspective, while aligning these departments to changes in each other’s forecasts.

Key Features

Capture

Rapid Web forecast and RightCaster™ Wizards provide a Microsoft Excel®-like interface and wizard to easily model common forecasting tasks such as ramp-up, price decay and shifts, freeing up time for reps to spend with customers
Bi-directional Excel integration lets users export Right90 forecasts, manipulate data offline in Excel and upload edited forecasts into the application
Multi-level and multi-plan forecasting enables users to create multiple forecast plans at any level of hierarchy. For example, product marketing can forecast at the product-line level while sales can forecast at an account level, yet still compare their forecasts.

Consolidate

Multi-dimensional roll-ups and drill down enable management to understand the forecast at an aggregate perspective yet still be able to drill down into product, customer or region hierarchies
Forecast snapshot variance analysis enables users to compare the forecast "as of" any point in time to the forecast today and instantly know what changed
Forecast process modeler enables management to apply layered judgments while maintaining the sales rep forecast for accountability and accuracy.

Align

Accuracy and attainment analysis allows users to spot trends in forecast performance and evaluate users, customers, or regions forecast performance
Change alerts track any significant movements in the forecast based on predefined thresholds
Forecast to target analysis enables users to understand specific percentage and absolute variances between forecast and target at aggregate or detail level.

For more information:
Download Sales Forecast Capture datasheet
View Web demo
Right90 Solutions Overview
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