Are you facing difficulties in inventory management? Are you looking for accurate sales forecasting and are curious to learn about some factors impacting your sales?
Today, businesses must be well equipped to not only predict sales targets but also be able to anticipate the changing market trends. Otherwise, they will miss out on critical business opportunities and will not be able to meet customer demands.
Why Forecasting?
Forecasting enables you to control your business by anticipating risks and opportunities. It helps you improve your inventory management, hence leading to a higher rate of ‘On-time In-full’ delivery. Furthermore, it helps you with supply chain management and excellent control of internal operations. Predictions help in planning your finances and marketing campaigns. To sum it all up, forecasting is the secret to continuous improvement in your business.
Accurate forecasting is as essential to your business as weather forecasting is to the captain of a Boeing 747. Just as the captain is responsible to give orders to his crew and ensure the well-being of the passengers, it is the management’s responsibility to give direction to their teams and Improve Customer Experiences. Furthermore, just as the Boeing captain’s orders are effective only as long as the data provided to him is accurate, a manager’s decisions will only be correct when the tools that he uses to make forecasts provide him with accurate results.
CRM to the Rescue!
For some, manual forecasting may seem easy. But collecting relevant data history and applying it to construct models, which make sense, can become a formidable task. Thankfully, today, solutions such as SugarCRM, combined with CRM Integrations, are available to do the math for you.
CRM makes use of data history to create trends and patterns to give you a clear picture of what the future may look like. It is a useful tool for the sales team to set their targets and for the marketing teams to focus on the trends before they launch their next campaign. A CRM, with its various built-in features, not only keeps the managers on the same page with their teams but also allows them to anticipate revenue and plan future activities.
A salesperson can be optimistic about the current position of sales, however, may be pessimistic when it comes to setting future targets. A CRM, on the other hand, cannot be biased. The projections will be based on facts and figures so that you always get an accurate sales forecast.
How About Some Sugar?
An Example
When BoxOp, a Copenhagen based mailbox and installation services company, experienced rapid business growth, they realized that they needed a new CRM system. A system which could solve their planning and forecasting problems and help them anticipate demand with increased efficiency. BoxOp found the perfect solution in SugarCRM. This allowed them to create accurate reports and sales forecasts as their business expanded to multiple locations across Denmark. BoxOp’s Sugar Implementation should act as an example for small, medium and large businesses alike since growth can be, at often times, unprecedented.
Forecasting Features of Sugar
Forecasting without the right tools is just as good as flipping a coin to help you make business decisions. Sugar helps ensure that your numbers are accurate and realistic. Sales reps can create and modify unlimited scenarios, with the option of Best, Worst, and Likely cases, before committing to a forecast. Sales managers can easily see all committed targets, modify quotas and forecasts, track changes, adjust commitments, and assign quotas.
Sugar keeps you updated about forecast submissions and a review of previous submissions can assist you in identifying patterns. In addition to this, Sugar lets you intelligently identify factors affecting your sales. Hence, essentially, it gives you the authority to control your sales.
Sugar gives you the ability to review and manage forecasts of each member of the team through a single worksheet. Assigning quotas, adjusting individual forecasts and analyzing the performance of individuals are no longer considered tedious tasks. For Sugar users, the solution to all these tasks can be achieved with a single click.
Sugar also allows your enterprise to keep track of customer activities. If you’re at a managerial level in your company, Sugar will intelligently shift your focus to more paramount issues. Hence, it saves the day at not only the sales level but at the managerial level as well. It allows your business to observe patterns without overriding complications and provides your company with some brilliant insights into factors affecting sales and marketing. To sum it up, Sugar makes forecasting effortless and precise giving control back to you.
Every business manager wishes to make the forecasting within their organization, at the managerial level, as smooth as possible. Equipped with team-wide forecast visibility, Sugar is the ultimate choice. It allows you to review and manage forecasts of your entire team.
Sugar, with its forecast feature, offers unlimited what-if scenarios and allows a real-time graphical view of the progress in sales. Moreover, managers and team leads can view the entire team’s quotas and forecasts on a single page or platform.
Pipeline Management in Sugar
Intuitive pipeline management allows the sales representative to effortlessly focus when needed. This is a stand out feature of Sugar. Pipeline Management in SugarCRM is possible across various time periods so you can plan things accordingly. In addition to this, Sugar allows forecasting using opportunity records, giving you the authority to choose which record to select for forecasting and see the distance to quota with every addition or subtraction of opportunity record. To sum up, Sugar offers control at the level of opportunity records to help forecast and telling you where to focus.
Aim for the Bulls-eye!
In a world where companies invest in the latest technologies to improve their efficiency, you cannot live in the past and rely on traditional or inefficient forecasting methods. It’s time to set the course and use a CRM solution that keeps your business one step ahead of your competitors in the future.
Rolustech is a SugarCRM Certified Developer & Partner Firm. We have helped more than 700 firms with various SugarCRM Customization and Integration. Get in touch today for your FREE Business Analysis. We will be happy to assist you!
