Last modified on 15/05/2023: Performance analysis in forecasts is now available for all Zoho CRM users in all DCs. Note that it was an early access feature available only upon request. As of May 10, 2023, it is rolled out for all Zoho CRM accounts. Find out more about forecasts in our help doc.

Hello everyone! 

We are thrilled to announce an exciting update on comprehensive performance analysis for CRM forecasts, including trends, gap reasons, improvement suggestions, and more.

Forecasts help organizations estimate how sales will progress in the approaching months, quarters, or fiscal years, as well as monitor current sales growth and find ways to accelerate it. They yield important insights into the company's performance and enable businesses to plan upcoming activities accordingly.

In the revamped forecast, until now, we provided the Target Achievement Report page, which showed the targets set for different roles within the organization, their achievements, and the number of open deals they had in a hierarchy. We're introducing a few enhancements to forecasts to provide even more details about performance, as well as an overview—which can be found in the User and Roles Performance pages and Forecast Overview section of the Target Achievement Report page.

We've introduced the following:

Let's have a look at these charts and at the overall enhancement in detail.

Forecast Overview

We've introduced a section at the top of the Target Achievement Report page called Forecast Overview. The analytics in this section help users track their performance and plan according to their targets and requirements.

We've introduced the User Performance page for users and admins to track individual performance in a particular period. Apart from providing insights into users' performance, on this page, there are additional details including charts and other widgets. Users can see suggestions for improving their performance or the reasons for which they're not able to meet their targets, and can therefore act accordingly.

The following details are available on the User Performance page:

The User Performance page also has charted—Performance Trends and Achievement Comparison—with similar functionality as those in the Forecast Overview section.

The Achievement Comparison chart compares total achievement over time with the number of available deals that can be completed, with a plot for overall targets provided for context.

Apart from these two charts, the User Performance page features the additional Current Deals by Stages chart. The main purpose of this chart is to show deal amounts in different stages. All deals in the current period are plotted as bar graphs according to the deal stage. Each bar breaks down the sum of the deal amounts into three forecast categories: pipeline, best case, and committed. If a pipeline is added, you can also view the current deals by stage based on that pipeline.

We didn't stop just at providing insight into user performance; we've also introduced two additional sections: reasons for gap, which highlights the gap between the target and the achievement and provides reasons that could have led to the gap, and the improvements section, which lists out the various improvements the user can make in order to reduce the gap.

Here are some examples:

Improvements

Role Performance page
Users can access the role performance report via the Roles Performance page by clicking on a particular role in the hierarchical view of the Target Achievement Report page.

The Roles Performance page also features sections that show reasons for achievement gaps and improvements (different than those suggested in the User Performance page). Admins can thereby analyze the performance of particular roles and their direct subordinates.

Here are examples of reasons for achievement gaps and improvement suggestions:

Reasons for achievement gaps