Get a realistic picture of your revenue with Forecast Adjustments in Zoho CRM

Get a realistic picture of your revenue with Forecast Adjustments in Zoho CRM

#crm25q1

Dear Customers,
 
We hope you're doing well!
 
Today, we're here with an important enhancement for business decision makers: forecast adjustments. Let's get straight to it!
 
With technology on the rise and CX at its core, businesses are constantly developing plans for the future. However, these plans come with risks and uncertainties, and businesses use forecast reports to gain a foothold on the actual performance and predict their trajectory.
 
In addition to being a guidebook for sales reps to pace their targets, a forecast report details the expected and achieved revenue for the forecast period. While the achieved revenue is an accomplished feat, the open deals showing the probable revenue creates hope and expectations for the decision makers. This optimism can be a problem as the revenue you see from open deals is the total of the deal amount projected, and the likelihood of these deals closing at the same price is extremely low.

  • There can be economic factors and competitor actions that affect margins.
  • The sales representatives' skills for upselling, cross-selling, or negotiating could positively affect the quoted deals.
  • A customer could add or subtract from their BOM and seek additional discounts.
  • Deals quoted in the forecast period may not always close by the end of it.
When a deal doesn't close as projected, it creates  a significant difference in the actual revenue for the forecast period, leaving the decision makers to work with outdated information.

Thus, to help you make informed decisions based on realistic and plausible numbers, we've added the ability to adjust your open deals revenue.
 
Adjusting the revenue means to come up with a realistic number considering all these influencing factors so that the decision makers can have informed expectations.

Adjusting forecast revenue:
Your open deals are a reflection of ongoing performance, and based on their momentum, they are categorized as pipeline, best case, and committed in your forecast report. However, irrespective of these categories, the best people to know and reflect your likely-to-be revenue are your sales rep and their managers.

  • They directly interact with your customers.
  • They know if and when a customer shall close a deal.
  • They negotiate pricing and discounts.
  • They have rich market insights from the field.
  • They can predict shortcomings.
Thus, we have added two types of adjustments for open deals: Owner adjustments and manager adjustments.
 
Owner adjustment lets the owners adjust their open deals' revenue considering the external factors.
Manager adjustment lets managers adjust and/or reevaluate the revenue per their expertise and their assessment on their subordinates' (deal owners') efficiency and strategic skills.

In addition to adjusting the open deals' values, managers can use their judgment to include or exclude a deal's revenue based on its likelihood to converge.
With these new settings, a deal's adjustment and judgment will more accurately reflect revenue and set realistic expectations for decision makers.
 
However, it's important to note that these values are estimated numbers and won't affect the actual value of participating deals. You can:
  • Look at the percentage of adjustments made.
  • Understand why the adjustments were made.
  • View adjustment logs for these values.

There—that's how you can adjust forecast revenue in your report. However, adjusting is not an inherent ability; a forecast manager or the admin has to enable it from the forecast configuration page.
That's all, folks! We hope this enhancement helps your leadership team make more accurate predictions.
 
This is open for customers in AU, CA, SA and UAE DCs. For other DCs, we will open gradually.


Thanks, and have a good one!
 
Kind regards,
Saranya Balasubramanian


Info
Moderation Update:
Forecast adjustments is now opened for users in all DCs.

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