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A Comprehensive Buyer's Guide to Sales Forecasting

Jul 03, 2024
3 min read

In today's competitive business landscape, accurate sales forecasting is the key to unlocking revenue potential and driving sustainable growth. The Xactly Sales Forecast Buyers Guide highlights the key criteria to consider when selecting a sales forecasting tool and what specific software functions to look for.  Xactly Forecast is a solution ideal for organizations seeking to accelerate their pipeline execution, optimize their sales forecasting processes, and streamline data flows and visualizations to deliver greater accuracy.

Award-winning AI

At the core of Xactly Forecast lies a commitment to providing more than just forecasts—it enables more accurate predictions fueled by more intelligent opportunity management and award-winning AI, delivering a more synchronized revenue engine.  

Any successful revenue ecosystem is predicated not on the amount of data at its disposal, but on how that data can be augmented to surface meaningful insights that uncover inefficiencies and growth opportunities. Xactly Forecast empowers businesses to unify diverse data sources, uncover performance trends, predict various sales outcomes, and craft precise sales forecasts. How? Going beyond traditional forecasting methods and incorporating predictive analytics, machine learning, and AI insights surfaced based on a company’s historical revenue performance. By analyzing these historical performance trends, Xactly Forecast identifies leading sales execution indicators, focusing reps on high-value opportunities and mitigating potential risks within their pipeline. 

Unified Forecasting for Greater Perspective

Seamless data integration from the different systems in your revenue tech stack provides a holistic view of the different types of forecasts delivered by the teams that make up the modern go-to-market (GTM) engine. As businesses grow and scale, they naturally expand their GTM teams to effectively engage, upsell, and retain customers, with each team having to forecast their ability to hit their given revenue targets. Xactly Forecast provides RevOps teams with the ability to easily ingest the varying data from each team and systems they use, and create tailored dashboards and metrics to visualize their current performance and predict future performance effectively. This can include channel partner revenue, individual product revenue performance, and more, enabling a consolidated view and clear picture of the health of the revenue ecosystem. 

Sales Execution and Pipeline Progression

In legacy systems or rigid tools, quickly identifying the likelihood of a deal closing can take significant time to inspect all the intricate details. Multiply that by 20, 30, or 100 deals in your pipeline, and you’re spending all your time trying to figure out what’s real.  That’s why Xactly Forecast helps leaders effortlessly track the health of their sales pipeline and monitor the progress of deals, through detailed health scoring for every opportunity, built on activity data, historical precedent, and AI. This allows for quick and thorough evaluation monitoring of each deal, promptly flagging potential risks, expansion, or acceleration opportunities.

Risk Analysis

Many sales leaders commonly ask themselves (or their reps), “How real is this deal” during pipeline reviews, yet they’re faced with either trusting their rep or spending more of their time to dissect the deal. It adds up quickly if they feel like they have to do that for every deal in their pipeline. This is why one of the most important components of forecasting and pipeline management solutions is the ability to view every deal in the pipeline quickly — sort and filter by stage, category size, close date, and more — and quickly drill into deal health and associated activities. This enables quick identification of risks in those critical opportunities, powered by activity and historical data. This along with the added flexibility to configure the scoring and alerts around their selling process and sales methodology across GTM Teams.

Seamless Integration

Simplify the evaluation and purchasing process through easy implementation, intuitive interfaces, scalability, and responsive support systems. Xactly Forecast’s smooth integration ensures that organizations can navigate and leverage the product with ease, driving better decision-making and enhanced sales execution.

Xactly Forecast emerges as a beacon of hope for businesses striving to achieve revenue predictability, streamline sales processes, and make data-informed decisions. Through award-winning AI, unified workflows, pipeline monitoring, risk analysis, and seamless integration — and its unwavering commitment to forecast accuracy — Xactly Forecast stands poised to modernize the way businesses approach sales forecasting and drive sustainable growth.

Try Xactly Forecast, Risk-Free! New Proof of Concept Available. 

*Terms and Conditions apply

  • Cloud/SaaS
  • Forecasting
  • Intelligent Revenue
Author
Will Watters, Head of Product Marketing at Xactly
Will Watters
,
Head of Product Marketing

Will currently leads Product Marketing at Xactly where he is responsible for pricing and packaging, GTM strategy, positioning and messaging, personas and buyer insights, and content marketing. He holds an MBA from The George Washington University School of Business.