Sales & Revenue Forecasting

Sales and revenue forecasting is at the heart of any company and there’s been a lot of point solutions developed to support this highly collaborative process. Most notably is the plethora of CRM applications ranging from simple desktop contact managers to hosted CRM solutions. All the attention lately has been for “on-demand” CRM, but, according to AMR, only 9 percent of CRM application sales are via the on demand model.

To us, this is not surprising given that in virtually every company, some component of the sales and revenue forecasting process is still driven through spreadsheets. They are available to everyone, easy to use, and can be used to quickly model virtually any sales scenario. The Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP) is ideal for managing the sales and revenue forecasting process in fast growing companies that is characterized by widespread and rapid change. The inherent collaborative features of BCP ensure that accurate and current sales data is available at all times to monitor the health of the company and to make strategic decisions.

Sales & Revenue Forecasting Challenges

Since spreadsheets are inherently not collaborative and enterprise applications leave you tethered to an Internet connection, it’s difficult for all participants in the forecasting process to get timely, complete and relevant information so they can provide their input based on the current situation

While most companies use CRM applications for opportunity tracking and sales activity management, they still rely on spreadsheets for iterating through the revenue forecast and determining demand and revenue at the unit level. It’s simply too difficult to make changes to lots of accounts in a CRM application when you’re trying to drive a consensus around the commit numbers

Consolidating input from multiple sales people through different hierarchies is a time-consuming process meaning the forecasting cycle is often limited to once a month

Understanding what’s changed since the last time you ran through a forecasting process is difficult with spreadsheets and CRM applications. Yet understanding where you’ve been and the historical relevance of prior forecast changes is essential for delivering a quality forecast

The Boardwalktech Solution: BCP-Driven Sales & Revenue Forecasting

Sales Pipeline Consolidation; sales people can continue to manage their individual sales pipelines in Excel on their desktop working in isolation. When they are ready to share their commit numbers, the individual pipelines are automatically merged with the shared master pipeline in the BCP server and all other users can see the changes at the cell level simply by refreshing the spreadsheets on their desktop

Shipment and backlog numbers can be automatically updated into the process giving sales teams a view into how far they have to go to make their number & future commissions

See a complete history of all sales data and how it’s evolved over time. Easily compare changes between any updates over any period of time

Finance, operations, and executives can access on-demand a consolidated pipeline using a browser or Excel and view the most current data

Excel’s powerful business modeling environment means any user can easily perform ad hoc/what-if scenario analysis

Sales management can identify changes in sales opportunities and analyze any required adjustments to their product mix, average selling price (ASP), and costs assumptions and the associated impact on profitability

Changes to your process such as releasing new products, changing product mix, or adjusting authorized pricing are centrally managed and automatically distributed to all process participants

Benefits of using BCP for Sales & Revenue Forecasting

Eliminating email for collaboration, cut & paste for consolidation, and “save-as” for versioning means the forecasting cycle can be shifted from a once a month, tedious process to an “on-demand” sharing of forecast data as it changes

Individual sales reps can continue to use Excel in isolation on their desktop which means adoption is high, training is easy, and time taken away from selling is minimized

Understanding what changes have occurred in an opportunity over its entire lifetime enables a better analysis of the development of individual opportunities, as well as the sales pipeline as a whole, and helps to calibrate expectations for future sales performance
Since spreadsheets are the common platform between different operating groups, all stakeholders in the sales and revenue forecasting process can use the same shared set of data, but only update their portion of the data. This means everyone stays aligned on expectations and company performance improves