What is Sales Forecasting?

Sales forecasting is a fundamental tool for creating a reliable financial plan. Learn how to forecast sales and build your company's financial strategy from the ground up.

If there ever were a time for businesses to wish for a crystal ball to predict the future, that time would be now. A persistent pandemic, a paradigm shift as operations transition from physical to digital, and looming uncertainty about the future are all factors that have worked together to put many businesses in a spin. And yet, many businesses are thriving, having successfully adapted to these unexpected changes. The key often lies in successful sales forecasting.

This blog explores this core function every business needs and the best tool to implement it.

What Is Sales Forecasting? The Function You Never Knew You Needed:

To envision your future business, sales forecasting is a data-driven crystal ball of sorts. It is a workflow of methodical business processes to predict future sales accurately.

Studying past sales trends, like your results from the previous quarter. This is critical feedback that every business needs.

Acting on this feedback to make your business adaptable for the future. This can include making changes to your business plans, budget, inventory, recruitment, services, and operations – essentially impacting every part of your business!

Anticipating future sales trends based on current market caps and trends of competitors. As you can see, sales forecasting is an iterative workflow to learn from the recent past, to quickly improve the immediate future.

Here, digital tools like CRM.io can help you automate this cycle, so your business consistently enjoys top-performing sales at all times.

Effective sales forecasting software can offer the following benefits to a business: Improved sales analysis, with higher accuracy in sales predictions. 1. Higher success in achieving sales targets 2. Lower wastage of inventory and other resources 3. Lower impact on budget 4. Promotes consistent cash flow and business growth 5. Better understanding of customer expectations 6. Higher customer retention figures 7. Improved business planning

Ultimately, they all work together to improve the health of your business. Read on to discover how the leading sales forecasting software fulfills these needs.

The Best Sales Forecasting Software

CRM.io is a leading project management and sales forecasting software app. It can be procured as a standalone app or part of a larger digital suite (called Infinity) from 500 apps. Also, the digital suite is constantly expanding, and customers are guaranteed future upgrades (including newly added apps) without a price hike.

Even as a standalone app, CRM.io is a complete package in itself, offering the following business functionalities.

Project management and collaboration

Customer/contact management

Customers are also addressed via (business) account management

Secure document-management and integration with external apps Lead generation

Business customizations

For sales forecasting, the app offers a two-fold approach

Sales Automation:This includes all processes in the workflow that can be automated to produce error-free results promptly.

Usage of interactive drag-and-drop flow builders to define and automate processes in the sales pipeline.

There are predefined sales workflows for common business functions (like administrative tasks). You can either use this or make a customized workflow of your own using the drag-drop editors. With this, you spend less time doing repetitive work in your business and more time making informed decisions to generate profit.

One-to-many access, where a centralized CRM.io project can be concurrently accessed by multiple teams in your business. Users can also edit or add to existing workflow nodes in a project.

Usage or webhook triggers (like calls or messages) to send real-time data to third-party applications. For instance, this can be used to send text messages/emails to your registered customers on the upcoming sales promotions.

The sales automation feature essentially provides an interface to create an actionable plan for your entire sales process.

Sales Analytics and Dashboards:

This feature is more data and metrics-driven to identify tangible sales trends to improve future performance. This is especially useful in creating sales targets and proposals.

Dashboards:

These provide a visual overview of the entire sales workflow (in terms of metrics collection). For instance, you can use dashboards to quickly pull up stats on revenue generated from leads, total deal value, deals expected in a particular quarter, and more.

Reports.####

These provide graphical representations of the metrics collected by the workflows.

Forecasts:

This is a continuation of present trends to forecast potential trends for future time periods. Together, these CRM.io features can help your team quickly automate the entire sales workflow, customize it for your business, and generate metrics and forecasts on the go to make informed decisions for the future.

This is just the kind of sales intelligence you need to keep your business productive and profitable every quarter!

How to Implement Sales Forecasting

The CRM.io app is available as a digital app at 500apps.com. From this, you can download/implement CRM.io from Products -> Sales -> CRM.io.

Here, the CRM.io app is available to businesses in 2 pocket-friendly ways.

As an individual, standalone ap: This is free for use for up to 10 users within your business. Ideal for startup companies and small businesses, you can log in using your Google credentials. Once you log in, you are taken to the Infinity suite dashboard. The CRM.io app is listed under the “Sales tab” in the dashboard. As the primary user, you can use this method to send an invite to 9 other users in your business (10 in total) to make the best of the free access.

As part of the entire Infinity suite: This is available at the cost of $14.99 and opens up access to all apps listed in the suite (one user only). Again, the CRM.io app is listed under the “Sales” tab in the opening dashboard.

The major advantage of this type of access is that you are freely upgraded with newly added apps at no extra cost. This is ideal if you are a small startup company and need access to an entire suite of apps to automate major business functions.

Conclusion

In 2022, an increasing number of businesses are turning to digital processes to improve sales predictions, optimize budget and resource usage, and turn around consistent profit. But, as prolific author John Naisbitt rightly called it, “The most reliable way to forecast the future is to try to understand the present.” Leading sales forecasting apps like CRM.io provide you with a proven, data-driven way to get it right.