Enhancement in Zoho CRM: Control who gets to participate in a forecast by customizing the user hierarchy

Enhancement in Zoho CRM: Control who gets to participate in a forecast by customizing the user hierarchy

Include only users from the sales function; exclude the rest 

Dear Customers,

We hope you're well!

We started this year with a series of exciting enhancements to Zoho CRM and to this list, we are thrilled to add an enhancement to forecasting.  Let's talk about goal setting!
 
Sales forecasting refers to the process of systematically predicting and planning your business's financial and quantitative goals. Although the term "forecasting" often implies a focus on a high-level business target, not all users, teams, or functions participate in the pipeline; forecast targets are actually tailored for organizations' sales teams.
 
Currently, however, Zoho CRM uses all active users in an organization to determine targets—from sales reps to inventory managers.


This creates confusion and leads to misinterpretations of data. Imagine an engineering lead—with no role to play in the sales pipeline whatsoever—is identified as having performed poorly, which subsequently affects their budget allocation.

Thus, we bring you the ability to customize hierarchies for forecasting.
 
As an activity, forecasting deals with the distribution of revenue targets across the workforce. To ensure we're only including participants who are involved in the forecast, we've come up with the ability to exclude participants that aren't relevant to pipeline generation.
 
As discussed above, forecast reports include all active users by default; but based on the hierarchy preferences you select in your CRM organization, you can do the following:

  • Exclude entire roles.
  • Exclude entire territories.
  • Exclude only selected individuals.

 
If you're using the reporting-based hierarchy option, you can exclude senior team members and their subordinates.

To understand how these exclusion functions work, let's look at a couple of examples:

Let's say you operate an online learning platform operating worldwide. Your CRM hierarchy includes your primary sales function and vendor/faculty management. Your faculty management department has a role to play in Zoho CRM but doesn't actually contribute to the pipeline. Accordingly, you can exclude the skills officer role from the forecast. With this setting, no user in this role is included in Zoho CRM's forecasting.


In another scenario, let's say only one of your sales interns sells, while the other intern assesses the company's sales trajectory. In this case, you can select only the intern that sells to be included in your forecast.

Likewise, you can exclude user groups or territories from your hierarchy. Say, for example, you don't expect a country country will contribute to your revenue because of its socio-economic conditions, you can exclude that territory from your forecasting altogether.

Including users, roles, or territories
All the instances of exclusion in your hierarchy are denoted by a visual cue for quick identification. If you'd like to include the role, territory, or users back your forecasting, you can do so by clicking on the "include" button next to them, or bulk-include them from the manage user options.


Notes
Note:
An excluded user cannot view forecast reports.
 
That's all for forecast hierarchy customization in Zoho CRM. If you have any questions or feedback, let's connect in the comments section.

Feature availability:


Release plan: This is available for all users in AU, CA and SA DCs. For the rest of the DCs we will gradually open and update in the comments section. 
 
Resource to refer: Help doc: Creating and working with forecasts

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

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