A well-adopted and open CRM system captures this baseline data and provides the opportunity to run more sophisticated analysis, either in excel or in BI tools.
According to Ventana Research “spreadsheets are used in 93 percent of sales organizations and almost half (49%) state reliance on them makes it difficult to manage sales efficiently.”
SugarCRM makes it easy for sales people to convert leads to opportunities and provides businesses with a totally customizable pipeline view, so that the stages make sense and accurately reflect the close probability
How many folks here would classify their business as B2B? (If many, then get into date versus dollar)
So, what’s more important for a deal, the dollar or the date?
Let’s say you have a 60-day sales cycle. A lead converts to an opportunity today and the rep pegs the close date at June 17 and they think it’s a $25K deal, let’s say. Let’s consider a 30% error in each of these two deal dimensions, If the deal comes in on time, but for 30% less, that’s a $7.5k hit to your Q2 number off forecast. If there’s a 30% slip in the timing, that’s a $25K hit to your Q2 number, as the deal will move to July.
A CRM tool alone won’t nail this problem, but it provides the baseline data to attack it.
The rest depends on a solid process, and there are several out there. One of the most popular is the Miller Heiman Funnel Scorecard.
Once you have confidence in the integrity of your CRM data, you can rely on it to calculate pipeline velocity (# of deals * Win Rate * Avg. Deal Size)/Average Selling Time in Days.
SugarCRM’s openness is a real asset when it comes to moving past excel and into more sophisticated analysis (Open web browser and show jasper and good data)
I want to share two personal stories about Sales Forecasting.Living Arts – seasonal business – northeast summer vacation store – higher end arts and crafts. Owner kept several years historical sales and marked them by weather. He benchmarked his sales staff against how well they did based on day of week, and weather. As a business ownerwe had several opportunities in the pipeline and the VC asked us which ones would close and we missed on several of them. We didn’t get the money.I’m frankly much more interested in you. I had a chance to speak with several of you, but I’d like to get a sense of who’s in the audienceHow many are in sales managementGeneral managementITOther
Good forecasting is important to any business that might seek a loan:Its hard to find a business that hasn’t felt the impact of tight credit. While things seem to be improving, loan officers are still pouring over your business before approving a loan.What’s one of the major red flags they look for? According to one analyst, a dramatic drop in discretionary spending. What can cause these? One cause is a missed forecastThere are also any number of industry-specific reasons why sales forecast accuracy is important. For instance, in Retail, effective Inventory Management depends on quality sales forecasting:Ending Inventory + Forecasted Sales – Beginning Inventory = Merchandise ReceiptsDo we all agree that forecast accuracy matters?Alright, so how are we doing? Raise your hand if you missed your forecast at least one month in the past 12. (Next)
This is from a blog about sales forecastingWhat are the consequences? I talked earlier about impact on your ability to get credit and in the retail space on inventory management.How about in your businesses. How does a missed forecast affect you?Great – interesting. Anyone else seeing that? (next)
Right, so here are a few common consequences.Goals your sales team can’t possibly meetUnless you subscribe to the management philosophy that the says “the beatings will continue until morale improves” then setting totally unrealistic forecasts is not a good recipe for Ineffective investmentWithout good visibility into your pipeline, it’s hard to know whether your investing scarce resources in the right dealsif you overshoot your forecast you need to scramble to add resources to service customersAssets used at low capacity – or not enough assets for the jobSimilar to the above, when you expect more sales than you get, you often have lots of slack, which of course costs money and affects the bottom lineMore sales than expected can strain post sales resources, manufacturing, supply chain and could impact customer satisfaction
Communicates the importance of forecasting and WIIFYConnects it with the daily activities of each salesperson:Accurately evaluating and recording opportunities by:SizeExpected close dateStage
A well-adopted and open CRM system captures this baseline data and provides the opportunity to run more sophisticated analysis, either in excel or in BI tools. According to Ventana Research “spreadsheets are used in 93 percent of sales organizations and almost half (49%) state reliance on them makes it difficult to manage sales efficiently.”SugarCRM makes it easy for sales people to convert leads to opportunities and provides businesses with a totally customizable pipeline view, so that the stages make sense and accurately reflect the close probabilityHow many folks here would classify their business as B2B? (If many, then get into date versus dollar)So, what’s more important for a deal, the dollar or the date?Let’s say you have a 60-day sales cycle. A lead converts to an opportunity today and the rep pegs the close date at June 17 and they think it’s a $25K deal, let’s say. Let’s consider a 30% error in each of these two deal dimensions, If the deal comes in on time, but for 30% less, that’s a $7.5k hit to your Q2 number off forecast. If there’s a 30% slip in the timing, that’s a $25K hit to your Q2 number, as the deal will move to July.A CRM tool alone won’t nail this problem, but it provides the baseline data to attack it. The rest depends on a solid process, and there are several out there. One of the most popular is the Miller Heiman Funnel Scorecard.Once you have confidence in the integrity of your CRM data, you can rely on it to calculate pipeline velocity (# of deals * Win Rate * Avg. Deal Size)/Average Selling Time in Days. SugarCRM’s openness is a real asset when it comes to moving past excel and into more sophisticated analysis (Open web browser and show jasper and good data)
Looking at historical data provides trends. Trends around SeasonalitySegmentsGeographiesAlso historical data on time in sales stage correlated with wins. This way, when you’re looking at your current pipeline and examining deals, you have the historical perspective to evaluate which deals are at risk.Sugar also has very strong and very flexible workflows. Using workflows you could set a rule that if there’s a change in the close date on any deal in a certain stage or if the close date for a deal changes more than once, trigger an email alert to management. This deal can then be reviewed in detail on the next sales meeting.
We all love tools and systems and we often over rely on them.One person I enjoy reading is Chris Dixon, who was a founder of SiteAdvisor, which Mcaffee bought and also a founder of Hunch, a recommendation engine, which eBay just bought.He writes: “Algorithms that deal with large data sets tend to be accurate at best 80%-90% of the time (an old “joke” about machine learning is that it’s really good at partially solving any problem). Consequently, you either need to accept you’ll have some errors but deploy the system in a fault-tolerant context, or you need to figure out how to get the remaining accuracy through manual labor.So, even with broad CRM adoption, well-defined sales stages, strong leadership that ensures adherence to a process, there is always a need for QA. And that’s where field management input comes in. Territory or segment managers understand the market and bring context to deals that would be difficult for any sales person to know. Like this company is a tire kicker. They can also temper any happy ears they may have on staff. And lastly, they can call out the sand bagger.
The good news here is that a CRM system that is embraced by your sales team and where there is a good solid process for reviewing the pipeline is going to provide this data for you.With each deal in SugarCRM, when it converts from a lead to an opportunity it is recommended to require the reps to input a dollar value and close date. The probability of closing is determined by the sales stage.
I think the key here is that any solid CRM system will help in these ways. IF (next)
…it’s is being used.So how do you encourage CRM adopted? What do you all think??
So what differentiates SugarCRM from all all CRM solutions. SugarCRM is CRM MADE SIMPLEForecastingSugarCRM supports forecasting and pipeline management. A sales representative's home page shows a real-time dashboard of the representative pipeline by sales stage. A manager's dashboard rolls up his/her reports by sales stage to show the cumulative progress by team. Within the dashboard, users can drill down on sales stage and individuals to see how individual deals are progressing. The product's sales forecasting capabilities also include scenario planning and forecasting triangulation between commit amount, goal, and historical performance.Quotes and proposalsSales stage managementThe opportunity module in SugarCRM comes with 10 pre-defined sales stage and customers can choose to completely configure these stages to their specific sales stage requirements Quota managementSugarCRM's forecasting and quota module fully supports sales managers to assign quota's to sales teams and sales individuals. Likewise, sales staff can manage their forecasts. All end-users can track their current vs forecast vs quota status in a pre-build report and can track their progress from a dashlet on their Sugar home page.Goal managementSugarCRM's forecasting and quota module fully supports sales managers to assign quota's to sales teams and sales individuals. Likewise, sales staff can manage their forecasts. All end-users can track their current vs forecast vs quota status in a pre-build report and can track their progress from a dashlet on their Sugar home page.Commissions managementCommission management is a configuration that can be set by the Sugar administrator using Sugar Logic.
And we make CRM Simple by offering customers a <CLICK> Flexible<CLICK> Intuitive and<CLICK> Open business solution<CLICK> And Flexible because our solutions work the way you work. Shortcut bar allows YOU multi-task (this addresses one of the biggest end user complaints) Very easy to customize YOUR My Sugar and Sales/Marketing Pages Customize Sugar around the unique way YOU work<CLICK> Intuitve, because our solutions bring you a simplified UI Contextual search makes it easier for YOU to find the right information Reducedthe average number of clicks by 30% The new interface acts the way YOU would expect it to ask. For example, when you get a list with more than one page and you page through it to look for a record, it will rememberwhere you were in the list<CLICK>Open, because Sugar integrates with your environment New UI is ready for the facebook, Google Apps and LinkedIn generation Application is screen resolution aware SCRM ready
Web based, scalable, social mobile, global. Not rip and replace but building on top of notes without sacrificing Lotus integration.
Maybe you are looking in getting better visibility into your overall company performance<CLICK> just like Caplin Systems who tripled their number of web leads and increased overall visibility into their company performanceOr maybe you need to reduce some of your operating costs<CLICK> like Tenzing Health who save on the bottom line by reducing costs and information processing timeOr <CLICK> Healthscreen who has saved thousands by integrating sales and back office operations.
And we make CRM Simple by offering customers a <CLICK> Flexible<CLICK> Intuitive and<CLICK> Open business solution<CLICK> And Flexible because our solutions work the way you work. Shortcut bar allows YOU multi-task (this addresses one of the biggest end user complaints) Very easy to customize YOUR My Sugar and Sales/Marketing Pages Customize Sugar around the unique way YOU work<CLICK> Intuitve, because our solutions bring you a simplified UI Contextual search makes it easier for YOU to find the right information Reducedthe average number of clicks by 30% The new interface acts the way YOU would expect it to ask. For example, when you get a list with more than one page and you page through it to look for a record, it will rememberwhere you were in the list<CLICK>Open, because Sugar integrates with your environment New UI is ready for the facebook, Google Apps and LinkedIn generation Application is screen resolution aware SCRM ready