When you are developing and maintaining a strong "forecast-culture" in you sales organization, the CRM system is an indisposable tool. But first you need to get the prerequisites ready. If you know where you want to get at with your way of forecasting this might take no more than a few minutes to get the system ready to handle forecasting. If you are about to figure out how you want to run forecasting in you sales organization, it might take a bit longer .....

The steps you need to complete to have the prerequisites in place are:

Lets walk through each of the four tasks.

1. Create sales accounts

You can quickly enter the accounts (dimensions) that yo want to forecast. Go to the menu Administration|System | Setup | LookUp Tables and find Sales Accounts.  Enter the sales accounts you need to work with, save your updates and you are ready to continue. In the exapmle below we see what seems to be a software company dividing sales into aa genral sales account and one account for software licenses, one for consultancy and one for maintenance and support.

2. Build Pricebook

The Price book is maintained in the Marketing menu:

Products are added by using the ”+”. You may operate more than one pricebook, and you can have as many products as you wish. For forecasting purposes it is not always necessary to use a full pricebook. Early in the sales cycle you might not even know what specific product you will end up offering. Therefore many ChannelCRM users keep a simple pricebook of main products or product groups. Others need to forecast on specific products and use the forecast module to create proposals with the correct product names etc. Contact ChannelCRM if you need a continuous automated update of you pricebook into the CRM system

3. Distribute Salesbudgets on the Sales Reps

If you have not created the sales reps as budget carrying in the user profile, now is the time to do so. Under Administration | System SetUp |User Management – make sure there is a checkmark with "Has Budget" for the sales reps carrying a sales budget.

To enter the actual sales budget go to menu Sales Management | Budget Edit. The sales budget is divided into moths and accounts, so that an individual sales rep has a budget per sales account per month. It is not required to fill out a budget for every combination. Press the button "Create Placeholder" and the system will create the rows - one row per sales rep per account per month. The only thing you need to do is to enter the monthly budget.

Hint: Use the group by function to make it easier to update many rows. For instance - if the budget is for account "Consulting" is 10000 per month for all sales reps every month of the year, you may save much time by grouping by or selecting "Consult" and isolate the rows. Updating all the rows with 10000 can be done swiftly.

4. Enter the Sales Model

Using sales model is not strictly necessary in ChannelCRM but you can use whatever sales model your company has decided to work with. All the way from sophisticated frameworks like Target Account Selling, Spin Selling, Customer Focused Selling to a simpler approach where you simply score the forecast with a percentage number per forecast item. You are free to use the model you like.

When using a sales model you enter it as "Project Scores". You define the Porject Scores under Administration | System Setup |Project Scores. The window used for updateing looks like this (possibly without the xmas skin):

You may define up to 16 steps or scores in you model. Each step is given a name (eg  ”Budget OK”) and a headline.

For each step you can associate two percentage values. The values determines with which percentage point weight the individual step influences the probability for the forecast to turn into a sale.

The reason that there are 2 values is that some sales models are using one value if the step has been concluded and another if the step has not been concluded. For instance you might ad 20% points to your overall probability if your prospect has confirmed that a budget has been allocated. But if you don't know whether there is a budget it might count as minus 10% points towards the overall probability for success.

You do not need two values for a project score.

When the sales model is ready, you can go ahead and do forecasting.

Please note, that if you need to use a scoring method which always gives the probaility associated with the last score in a sequence of filled out scores, you have to make sure that this scoring method is selected. You do so in the CRM Manager module. Log on to the CRM Manager and select ”Set forecast weighting to highest score only”:

Create Order - build up the sales forecast

In ChannelCRM your forecast will consist of ”orders”. Orders are sales activities or projects that you want to turn into actual sales or closed orders. You and your sales reps can enter the orders in the Order window under the Forecast tab in the Company window. By doing so the forecast immediately becomes visible and operational and you can immediately use it to help manage your own and your sales reps activity and behavior.

Create Order

For the individual sales rep it is simple to keep up to date with his own forecast. Choose the menu Forecast (in the Activity Centre)

The forecast is shown as a graphical representation either in columns or as lines for accumulated values over time.If you choos "weighted" the graph will show the wighted value of the forecast according to the salesmodel and the scoring of the sales projects.

If you click on the graph a list of the relevant forecast/orders will appear underneath the graph

If you clisk the projects the actual sales projects/orders will open and can be manipulated.

Thus the forecast window can be used for speedy updating of forecast but also as a way to create the ToDos and actions that are needed to drive the projects forward.

The forecast module can be selected for an individual user, for a user and the users referring to the user, or for the entire organization - if the user acces rights permits so.

The tab folder "Data" shows the raw forecast data. This list can be grouped and sorted and can calculate totals and subtotals.

Off course you may print out the forecast on paper and bring them to your sales meeting. You can also export the forecast to a spreadsheet.

Here we would like to suggest that you spend as much time with the forecast inside the CRM system. Simply bring the CRM system to your forecast meeting! The reason is that when you start discussing the cases in the forecast you will need all the other information around the case that will not be on the paper or in your spreadsheet:

All of these questions can be documented by clicking from the forecast to the relevant parts of the ChannelCRM system And in the system you and your sales reps can easily crate the activities you need to push forward.