Are your sales forecasts still based on primitive guesses and intuition? In this blog post we share tips on how to improve forecasting accuracy with HubSpot and Dear Lucy.

What is a sales forecast?

Gartner defines sales forecast as: 

“..a projection of future sales revenue and a prediction of which deals will move through the sales cycle. Sales forecasts drive short-term spending decisions and impact decisions on key deals.”

Why are sales forecasts important?

Accurate sales forecasting is the foundation for success. It enables smart decision-making, informs budgets and helps detect potential threats before it’s too late.

Companies with more advanced forecasting processes and tools perform overall better than their peers because they deeply understand their business drivers and can shape the outcome of a sales period before the period closes. A sales forecast is the most critical aspect of meeting quota.

By identifying the biggest opportunities, the entire revenue team including sales, marketing, customer success, finance and executives can all align and focus their efforts to make the biggest achievable business impact.

How to accurately forecast sales?

Improving the accuracy of your sales forecasts depends on multiple factors, including strong collaboration, reliable sales data and an analytics-based process.

Typically sales forecasting is a weekly, iterative process including the following reviews:

• One-on-one sales meetings between sales leaders and reps for pipeline inspection, reviewing key opportunities and adjusting individual forecasts.

• Forecast calls with the revenue organization for pipeline health and pipeline coverage, aligning on prioritizations and confirming team/business forecasts.

• Presentation of the numbers to leadership, board and investors for further discussion and measures.

The key to a successful review process are predictive, real-time insights based on your sales and revenue data from your HubSpot CRM. They allow you to easily analyze your sales pipeline, identify trends and patterns, and adjust your forecasts based on different scenarios.

Predictive sales forecasting with HubSpot and Dear Lucy

Dear Lucy automatically gathers data from your HubSpot across sales, marketing and revenue teams and synthesizes the data into real-time status, actionable insights and predictive forecasts. Dear Lucy’s visual sales insights present a single-source of truth for sales reps, sales leadership and management across the iterative sales forecasting process.

Key insights for accurate sales forecasting include: 

• Predictive sales forecasts segmented by team, business unit, business type

• Recurring (MRR) and one-off revenue forecast

• Predictive deal scores highlighting the high priority deals and deals at risk

• Pipeline analytics such as pipeline coverage, pipeline snapshots, deal slippage

• Actionable goals highlighting the strategy and business requirements

Generating sales forecasts requires a rigorous and well-designed forecasting process combined with well-defined data points in HubSpot CRM, such as forecast category, opportunities amount, sales stage, close date and ie. historical performance. When well-communicated and understood, your forecasting accuracy and sales accountability improve dramatically.

Key benefits of predictive sales forecasting

Traditionally sales forecasting has been a process of exporting CRM data to spreadsheets, manually processing the data and presenting forecasts mostly based on a gut-feeling.

Data-based forecasting and real-time insights forces teams to carefully plan and execute for greatest achievable business impact. Automatic data processing saves a substantial amount of hours wasted and helps teams focus on finding the best paths for reaching and exceeding quota.

Interested?

Dear Lucy is a Certified HubSpot App partner offering comprehensive sales & revenue insights. We highly recommend starting a trial and getting live insights on your sales performance within just minutes!