Sales forecasting software

What is sales forecasting?

Sales forecasting is the process of predicting future sales and revenue based on historical data, current trends, your team’s estimates, and market research. With this data, you predict how many deals you’ll close and how much revenue it will generate.

Businesses can then use these forecasts to make decisions about the future. Sales forecasting informs choices around staffing, inventory, budgeting, sales strategy, and more.

Why is sales forecasting important?

Accurate sales forecasting is a key activity for companies because it allows them to make informed decisions for the future. If your predictions are incorrect, the results could be costly.

For example, if you under-predict demand for a certain product, you could find yourself without enough inventory.

Conversely, you could find yourself wasting money on too much inventory. Or you might not have enough staff to onboard new clients properly.

Because the stakes are so high, taking advantage of all the tools and information you can find to produce accurate forecasts is vital.

How does sales force automation work?

Sales force automation (SFA) is a software tool that performs various sales tasks that your sales team has historically done. These tools support your team and alleviate the burden of menial tasks and tasks that software is better at than we are.

SFA relies on AI and other technology to do key sales activities such as data entry, analyzing data, providing timely reports and reminders, and more. SFA supports your sales forecasting by automating key tasks with targeted software. Sales automation will make your predictions more accurate and less time-consuming to generate.

SFA can help you with the following tasks and more:

• Track and visualize the sales pipeline

• Calculate the time to close

• Identify deals that need attention

• Report on progress so you can make strategic changes

• Create real-time sales dashboards

• Integrate with CRM and sales data

• Identify top performers

• Score leads

Forecast your sales and do much more using Freshsales CRM

Freshsales CRM contains the full spectrum of sales forecasting features, but that’s just one part of what this software can do. It’s a full-service CRM packed with other key features to facilitate sales enablement and help your business succeed.

• Unified database: The centerpiece of the CRM is the unified database that contains all of your lead and customer information in one place. This gives you a real-time 360° view of your lead to easily personalize interactions.

• User-friendly interface: The entire Freshworks suite of tools is user-friendly and easy to learn. It’s great to have tools full of amazing features, but they won’t help you much if your team has difficulty using them. With Freshsales, everything is straightforward, and if you still have trouble, reach out to their support team.

• Omnichannel capabilities: Freshsales CRM boasts omnichannel capabilities so you can be where your potential customers are.

• Workflows and sales sequences: Supercharge your entire sales process with workflows and sales sequences that ensure everything flows smoothly. Your CRM tracks where the lead is in the sales cycle and executes or prompts appropriate action according to the rules you set up.

• Customizable: Freshsales CRM is easy to customize, so you can make this CRM your own without a dedicated IT team, from the basics like editing field labels and changing up dashboard views to higher-level tweaks like customized pipelines and workflows. Of course, you can always use the out-of-the-box templates.

• Flexible pricing plans: No matter your budget, Freshworks has a plan that will work for you. You'll find what you need from their $0 free option to enterprise plans.

What makes Freshsales CRM the best sales forecasting software? 

Freshsales CRM is a feature-rich platform from Freshworks that includes robust sales forecasting software. With their CRM, you can access various tools that provide consistent, fast, and accurate sales predictions. Here are some of the reasons why Freshsales CRM is the best sales forecasting solution.

Forecast and track your goals

Freshsales CRM analyzes the sales cycle of all your deals. It allows you to set the win/loss probability for every stage of your deals in the pipeline based on your sales data and process. With enough data, the system can estimate the possible close date automatically. Based on this, a forecast summary is created. 

With these accurate forecasts, you can assign individual or team goals. You can set goals based on territories and different products.

Freshsales CRM lets you set goals for:

• Forecasts based on revenue 

• Forecasts based on won deals

Revenue goals give you inputs on the actual sales numbers and how likely your team is to achieve them.

On the other hand, won deals give you a clear picture of the number of deals closed by a team or individual during a particular period. It will give you an idea of the number of deals won and determine the average deal win rates.

Chase the RIGHT deals

Your business likely generates many leads, and that’s great. But not every lead is going to become a paying customer. This means unless you have a way to identify the right leads, your sales team could spend a lot of time and money chasing down deals that aren’t ever going to close. 

To this end, it makes sense for companies to score leads based so they know who to focus on. Although you can do this manually, one of the key advantages of using a cutting-edge tool such as Freshsales CRM is that it uses AI to track your lead’s activities and score them for you. 

Freshsales CRM logs all your interactions with leads across channels and can then analyze their activity to generate a score. You can set custom parameters for your business to help you identify who is likely to buy. Not only do you know where to focus, but you can also forecast sales based on the number of qualified leads currently in your pipeline.

Identify your top performers

Freshsales CRM collects comprehensive data for each member of your sales team and synthesizes this information. With this power, you can identify top performers based on sales performance. Then, sales managers can incentivize those top sellers by setting new benchmarks and offering reward programs for meeting sales goals.

You can also leverage insights about your top sellers’ processes in training new and underperforming sales reps. And it’s easy to see who needs help based on your current data and forecasts.

Reports and analytics

The reporting and analytics capabilities of Freshsales CRM give you the critical insights you need for accurate predictions. Forecasting reports act as quick reality checks to track your current progress against the targets you set for yourself. 

Freshsales CRM provides a wide variety of out-of-the-box reports and allows you to create custom reports unique to your company. These reports help sales leaders track performance and develop strategies to achieve the numbers. They also help the business leaders to stay informed on the team’s performance. 

Freshworks analytics capabilities go beyond generating sales reports to providing graphic dashboards to keep key metrics front and center and allow you and your team to truly visualize your pipeline and process.

Integration with existing CRM systems

Sales forecasting software is at its most useful when integrated with your CRM system. Accurate forecasting depends on high-quality, real-time, relevant data. Your CRM is a powerful repository of sales data. If your sales forecasting software doesn’t connect to your CRM, you’ll waste valuable time transferring data.

Instead, you could have seamless forecasts available with just a few clicks using a sales CRM like Freshsales. The ability to have everything all in one place saves you time and reduces the chances of error. It also ensures that you are considering all information as you plan for the future.

And it does more than just crunch numbers. Using artificial intelligence (AI), Freshsales can deliver sophisticated forecasts and identify problems and bottlenecks early on. PlusAI also learns over time, so your forecasting tools get more accurate over time as well.

Real-world use cases

Here are some real-world sales forecasting use cases:

Lead scoring

Small businesses often have small sales teams, so they need to focus on converting leads. Marketing teams put a lot of effort into lead generation, and these activities can bring in plenty of potential customers. But if you have 100 leads and only two salespeople, it’ll take far too long to follow up with each lead.

That’s where sales forecasting software comes in. Lead scoring tools can rank each lead by how likely they are to buy. Then, using automation, they can assign the highest-ranked leads to the sales rep with the right expertise and bandwidth.

Then, your reps can zero in on converting those high-scoring leads. This maximizes your limited resources for maximum results using a running tool.

Revenue forecasting

Understanding future revenue is vital to effective sales planning. Without a crystal ball, it’s up to you to determine how much revenue your business will bring in. If your business depends on closing sales, that means calculating how much revenue is in the pipeline and how many of those deals are likely to buy.

This can be done manually. You must assess each lead individually and determine how likely they are to close. Then, you must accurately project how many new high-quality leads will likely enter the pipeline. This requires analyzing each lead, getting input from your sales reps, going through spreadsheets, looking at previous years’ numbers and historical sales, and more.

All of that analysis can be very time-consuming, and forecast accuracy is unreliable. However, sales forecasting software can compile and analyze the sales analytics and other information for you and quickly provide a more reliable forecast.