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That situation where something is in ‘best case’ forecast category (but not quite ‘commit’) yet someone is pretty bullish about it coming in and you want to mark it as such...that’s deal level forecasting!

Speaking to @Tpang today (Clari EMEA, CSM) and there definitely seems to be a trend for customers looking to do this more for extra revenue precision!

The prevailing strategies to do this:

  1. Have an additional “In The Call” field that people can mark - for extra granularity in a deal.
  2. Have Forecast fields on an Opportunity for each level in the hierarchy i.e. Rep / Mgr / CRO - helps analyse how a deal is viewed by different people in the revenue chain. 

Anyone, have any additional thoughts on how to manage this / creative ways to get more granularity over above putting something in a forecast category? Would love to hear on this hot topic….

 

It’s always tricky to address the grey area and so far the only working solution I have successfully implemented is to create one additional parameter, “Managers Judgement” or simply “MJ”

(This implementation was in a Spreadsheet model so it was fairly easy and straightforward) 

Example :

  1. Deals in Best Case but possibility of a Commit should be flagged as MJ. So that set of deals will be “Best Case MJ”
  2. Deals in Commit but awaiting for few formalities should be flagged as MJ. So that set of deals will be “Commit MJ” (This can be optional and can be worked out based on requirement) 

Advantages :

  1. Additional buckets like “Best Case MJ” and “Commit MJ” will certainly help to minimize the grey area.
  2. Deals moving across buckets are more likely to get questioned by the Sales Manager.
  3. Deals in MJ bucket will have more emphasis and attention by Sales Manager because “Sales rep is more than sure about it - that's why it is in MJ"  

Disadvantages :

  1. Reps will have to bear accountability of updating ONE MORE field.

Hope this helps, Happy to discuss it further.

Really like this @Manoj Shedbalkar and thank you for sharing! I think it matches the use case really well and certainly falls under the ‘deal level forecasting’ sphere (albeit with some slightly different naming convention….but that will be suited to your business!).

Totally appreciate the disadvantage of having an extra field to complete but I suppose it’s a small edit to make (and can be done so easily in the Clari Opportunity Grid UI! 😀) that it is far outweighed by the extra level of revenue precision it brings throughout your sales org!  

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