Keren Gavra, Geeta Deodhar, SugarCRM Effectively forecasting revenue targets is a critical task for any business regardless of size or win-rate. For many sales organizations, the primary obstacle is capturing accurate forecast data that the sales professionals can deliver on. In these organizations, forecasting is often perceived as a chore to appease sales management - resulting in resistance by the team and partial reporting of forecasting information. In this session you will learn how Sugar forecasting puts the sales professional first by allowing individuals to effectively manage their own forecast, perform what-if analysis, and publish the right level of detail to sales management.

1. Forecasting Tools
Sales People Actually Want To Use
Geeta Deodhar and Keren Gavra
SugarCRM Product Management

2. Enterprise Forecasting
• Why accurate forecasts are
critical for every business?
• Why accurate forecasting
are difficult to achieve?
• What are the benefits of
good forecasts?
• How can Sugar 7 solution
help?

3. Forecasting Accuracy – Why is it critical?
• Forecast impacts all aspects of the business
• Forecast is an excellent key performance
indicator to identify shortcomings in
– Qualification process
– Sales process
– Sales skills
– Quality of customer data
– Alignment in different departments

4. Forecasting Accuracy – Why is it so difficult?
• For sales representatives
– Absence of well defined sales process
– Insufficient customer data
– Lack of tools to collaborate effectively
• For sales management
– Focus on numbers and not on deals
– Sales reps regularly missing their quota
– Inability to manage overall business

5. Forecasting Accuracy – What are the benefits?
• For your business
– Better alignment across departments
– Improved efficiency and reduced cost
– Engaged sales force and happy stakeholders
• For your customers
– Enhance satisfaction thru’ engaged sales force
– Predictability of product quality and availability
– Better relationship based on mutual trust

6. Forecasting Accuracy – How can Sugar help?
• For your sales representatives
– Central customer and activity storage
– Activity intelligence to help focus where needed
– Visibility into granular pipeline for better control
• For your sales management
– Automatically generated forecast
– Single page access to entire team’s forecast
– Intelligence to help focus where needed most

7. Sugar 7 – Enterprise Forecasting
• Streamlined administration
– Custom calendar – Time Periods
– Custom forecast categories enabled thru’ tags
– Configurable best / likely / worse scenarios
• Streamlined granular pipeline
management for sales representatives
• Forecasting for sales management with
transparency across their sales teams

8. Sugar 7 – Intuitive Pipeline Management
• Manage pipeline across time periods
• Inline edit revenue lines in the worksheet
• Tag revenue lines to include/exclude/upside
• See distance to quota for each data variation
• Know where to focus and spend time
• Save draft version as needed before commit

9. Sugar 7 – Forecasting For Managers
• Review forecast across the team
• Assign quota from single worksheet and
track individual performance periodically
• Get alerts when team submits forecast,
review past commits to identify patterns
• Access intelligence to review influence of
different factors on the forecast to make
better decisions

10. Enterprise Forecasting – Demo
• Sales representative
– How does granular pipeline management help sales
representative track sales opportunities better?
• Sales manager
– How does the new forecasting worksheet enable sales
managers to better manage forecast across the entire team with
efficiency?

11. Thank you