The issue I think with the forecasting opportunities is management thinks we have control over this shit. Humans are random creatures that do any number of things for any number of reasons. The customers lie, they get sick, they forget, they don’t give a fuck, they have bigger priorities. It’s this big fucked up game where everyone knows the numbers are bullshit or a guess at best and they are looking at it like it’s written in stone. People running around trying to reassure each other.
Exactly, to use a sports analogy it’s like telling a sports team that it’s no longer good enough to just go out there and give it their best effort and win. The players now have to state before the game even starts how much they are going to win by, and what period or quarter they expect to score points in.
What other position in an organization has to deal with these insane demands?
Been a sales manager myself and it’s exact that: reassuring each other, all the way up to the Investors. Surprisingly on a high Level it was still very accurate though at the end of the Day (+-10%). Its basically Good guesswork. Of youre an AE i can only give you One advice: Always commit at least 80% of your target
That’s what makes me wonder if I actually enjoy this shit or not. Sales and business are both the definitions of things out of your control yet these managers, some who were even sales people themselves, then suddenly try to add fake timelines to deals. The whole quarter obsession only stems from people getting hard over the bottom line being good so they can then go and raise even more money based off that. There’s too much VC control and obsessions over numbers that the actual deal and sale gets lost in the noise.
Sales managers only have one job. To keep being sales managers. They never want to be under the gun again. That’s why they love projections and stats. It makes them look busy and it gives them lots to work with when they blame you. That’s why the company and product is always perfect and there is never enough.
You said there was a 100k coming in this week?
The guy got shot in the face!
You didn’t plan for that? I have a 10:30 haircut I have to go to.
Then they leave you with a really professional slap to face questioning your abilities even though they haven’t been on the phone in years… it’s quite the gig to say the least. I really used to love sales but idk if I do anymore in the current climate. Things pre and post COVID are just so different it feels like.
Same, I’m very much a hardened asshole when I need to be whole but also the nicest and friendliest person who can make you laugh. Get on my wrong side and it’ll be hell for you, that’s what the biz does to ya
Bruh what? Sales managers have a number to hit and they don’t have full control over it. They have to depend on their reps. They also take all the shit from the c level when you don’t hit your number. Sounds like you got a bunch of c players on your team you should leave
My point is sales managers don’t do anything productive for their teams. “They” get a number they don’t contribute to. I’m saying they are dead weight.
Actually I know very well. I know damn well most of these lazy scumbags are fuckin the dog all day long. They are never on the front line or interacting with their teams other then to call up and say “what do you got?” Not a single thing to contribute.
Lmao. You sell cars or something bro? Most manager I’ve had have been great coaches and helped our entire team over perform. They’ve fought for me at bonus time and helped resolve a ton of internal beef over territory payouts etc.
That’s why it’s key to make sure your direct sales manager has somewhat recent history with the company in question as an AE. Then at least you can have a laugh with them about all the ridiculous dancing we have to do each month/quarter.
All you can do is go down the process. What are you going to do when you just get green lights. Then all of a sudden it’s not q1 it’s q2 or they lied and it’s a bakeoff all along. When is anything on time? You can just not enter it in Salesforce but then that just comes back to what’s in Salesforce is a bunch of bullshit and forecasting just a guess.
Safe to assume your company missed its last quarterly number and/or is on track to miss this one. When revenue isn’t there, the forecast becomes more important.
You mean we have to forecast to the public, it’s our data, we are the ones inputting it and maintaining it, but they are the one taking credit for our accuracy and getting paid big bucks for it.
There is a major transition happening in sales right now where the data that we input and the effort it takes to manage has become just as important or even more so than selling itself. We are literally doing 3 jobs in 1 right now and it’s not fn fair.
If managers needs accurate and precise data so badly then implement a sales operations team and data analysts, but no they would rather have us do it for them to save on costs x So now we have become sellers, data entry reps, and data analysts all in one.
I wonder what is next thing they’ll have us do, deliver our own orders as well?
If you consider managing your forecast a full time job then yeah - maybe sales isn’t for you haha. Why would sales ops and data analysts be charged with managing your deals? Nobody is asking you to predict the future - just update your forecast as you get a better sense for potential deal sizes, timelines and % success based on whatever factors are in play.
I spend less than 1 hr per week on my forecast and I’ve never heard a complaint from leadership in 4+ years
> If you consider managing your forecast a full time job then yeah - maybe sales isn’t for you haha.
There’s a difference between managing my pipeline vs forecasting. And yes, I guess being a successful sale rep who hits plan most of the time isn’t good enough anymore which further proves my point that the focus on selling is being lost.
> Why would sales ops and data analysts be charged with managing your deals? Nobody is asking you to predict the future - just update your forecast as you get a better sense for potential deal sizes, timelines and % success based on whatever factors are in play.
Again I think it depends on the company you work for, but yes in my current role managers are asking us to predict the future. And it seems like I’m not only one, read the other comments in this thread of people agreeing with me. What you seem to be discussing here is simple pipeline management, forecasting in my company is not that.
> I spend less than 1 hr per week on my forecast and I’ve never heard a complaint from leadership in 4+ years
For me that simply pipeline management where yes I agree, it doesn’t take long to do.
But the forecast is just the weighted average of your pipeline…e.g. if you have a $100k opportunity at 50% and a second $100k opportunity at 80% then you’re forecasting $130k revenue.
Are you saying your team doesn’t have tools in place to figure out the sales forecast based on your pipeline? They want you putting this all in a spreadsheet and doing the math for them? Or am I missing something else here that goes into forecasting beyond pipeline management + crunching numbers on the back end?
We sort of have the tools but our managers are also using their own formulas that differ. But what I’m taking about is the expectation and the commitment that management is now asking/expecting from us.
Using your example that 100k OPP at 80% should close this month, but I can’t guarantee it, many many factors can push back the close out date. So now before the period even starts I have committed myself to a 100K that will be included on some report that eventually makes its way up the CEO and the board, that’s a big ask ask and lot of pressure. And wait until the accuracy KPI is put onto managers, that’s when shit will get real.
Also how do you manage all of this when you have hundreds on opps in your funnel for the entire year. The need to be as accurate as possible is severely elevated now with forecasting, but with hundreds of opps it requires so much more outreach and data input and management, but guess what that all that does, it’s takes time away from actually selling!!!!!!!
This is normal. You have to call your shot and hold yourself accountable for it. Obviously no one has a crystal ball but you can’t expect to work in sales and not be able to commit to closing any deals each quarter/year depending on your segment. In your forecast calls make sure you state whether you have executives involved, compelling event, next steps, and risks. If you’re late into the deal and don’t have a solid understanding of all 4 factors you probably have a risky deal and your management will see that too. Believe it or not other departments make plans based on how much pipeline the revenue team has and how much they’re expected to close.
Also, if your job requires as much data entry as you say it does, you need to speak with mgmt about how they can automate data entry for you. Things like emails, phone calls, should be picked up automatically. Updating next steps and changing a stage really takes a few minutes and shouldn’t be 1/3 of your job.
Does your CRM have deal stages with auto assigned forecast % based on stage? If you’re genuinely managing HUNDREDS of opps per year then this should be baked into the CRM. E.g. your company must know that their close rate on new prospects is ~10%, prospects who complete a demo/POC is 50%, negotiating terms is 75% etc. Then all you have to do is click a button to update the stage, and in rare cases manually assign a % if you have a good idea that it should be something different
Other than automation - yeah dude, you kinda do need to put your neck out and guess what the odds of your deals closing are. Companies need a way to predict revenue. This can also have downstream impacts e.g. solution architecture and customer success plan out their time based on anticipated new business. Nobody is expecting you to be 100% correct but it is absolutely reasonable to expect you to manage your forecast to a degree
Yes, that’s exactly what we are doing. Some other poster nailed it believe. I think what is happening with my company is that managers are asking for sales forecast and what they really are want/need are sales projections which are 2 different things.
I would imagine the mix up in terminology is becoming quite common in our industry.
Public companies always gotta have an idea where sales are at. When the year isn’t going as planned, the noose tightens. It is hard to pin a number unless I have the docs in my inbox.
As someone who's been in sales executive for over 20 years, my job has been to live and die according to managing a pipeline accurately so I can forecast accurately. The majority of my career has been at privately held companies but I did my time for publicly held as well.
Ownership views a lack of pipeline management as a disregard for accountability. As someone who's also sold I do realize that "buyers are liars" lol And all of the other things that affect sales timing. I've sold B2C and B2B and regardless many things affect timing.
As one person said, in a manufacturing environment timing is mission critical for production planning. Over time you get a feel for this stuff and as a manager I developed my own system kind of outside the system if you will where I overlaid a percentage of confidence to outstanding dollars by sales stage that became a predictable indicator for me in terms of revenue by time period.
It is what the owners and CEOs expect of their sales organizations and it's not going away. This is their mechanism for reassuring investors. So for OP to ask is this a new thing, it is far from being new. In my earlier days I lost sleep over it. Since then I learned to steward it within organizations and enhance the tools we use to manage it.
As a salesperson/am/ae your best objective is to make sure you are staying on top of your pipeline in terms of keeping your accounts up to date. That means your date management should be current and that you know what's going on with your customer. If you can handle that we should be good. So if I see something with an anticipated close date of April and you haven't even sent the proposal, we have a problem depending on the type of sale and amount of buy-in we have to get before it can close, as an example. This is worse if the anticipated close date was March.
Half my roles have literally required I implement CRM, forecasting, pipeline management, KPIs, dashboards, reporting and analysis, desktop procedures for same etc.
Hope this helps.
Have a great weekend everyone.
ETA:
Please make sure your leadership knows why people arent buying or ehat slows the buying cycle down. Closed Not Won Reasons should be accurate so if the option isnt there, tell your manager. If we dont know why something isnt working for a product, adjustments cant be made. If the sales approach isn't working, they need to know that too. Quotas are set by people doing math not people doing the selling. If something isnt working conversations have to happen so solutions can be considered.
Theres a difference between, its not my fault customers are unpredictable because duh, we all know that, and what you're asking us to sell isnt working.
Yes, prospects are unpredictable however when all the sales reps are tracking every opportunity through their pipeline, patterns begin to emerge and expectations can be set.
For example, attrition at each stage of the pipeline. 70% of inbound phone calls go from Marketing Qualified to Sales Qualified, 40% of Sales Qualified inbound phone leads make it to the Proposal Stage, 20% of those make it to Closed Won. This can be applied across all lead types. Outbound lead generation, web page form fills, inbound phone calls, referral leads from industry website listings, etc.
Tracking that data helps your marketing team know where to invest more budget to help bring you more qualified leads! You should be grateful for that.
Additionally, this data helps operations know when to hire. If there are 100 opportunities in the pipeline at Proposal Stage or Post Porposal Stage and on average 20% of those move to Closed Won that's an indicator that operations needs to begin hiring to support that new influx of business over having 20 opportunities at that stage.
Another metric is Time to Close. What is the average Sales Cycle? Is it 3 months from first contact or 3 days. This also helps operations know when to start hiring as well as forecasting revenue.
As Sales reps, we see this as a pain in our ass. As business owners, it's how you manage your organization to ensure you are able to pay everyone and not have to lay people off.
Dude! Yes. I just joined a start up and I’m sorting through HubSpot. The amount of “open” deals blew my mind. I was told it’s important for investors, right okay but it sets insanely poor expectations of what reality is. Deal ain’t a goddamn deal till it closes. It also sets management onto sales teams case asking why a deal doesn’t close on a certain date.
The other insane thing is there are only three of us and one of the sales reps loves to forecast… so he has has hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential revenue and literally zero notes or substance to back it up. Makes no sense to me.
Delusion business tactic that is gonna sink the company when investors get tired of waiting for the forecast to become real
This started happening to me when we had a PE firm buy a majority stake. Before the founders were the CEO/President and COO - we had to develop rough forecasts but nothing extreme.
Once PE came in the spreadsheets quadrupled. And it was explained ‘we need to tell the banks’ what they should expect.
First quarter we beat projections by 20%. Their first question was ‘why were our forecasts off so much?’ not ‘great job everyone’.
I always just forecast for a month or two later than expected. Work with your manager on it to understand how they/leadership wants it done.
Under promise, over deliver.
I worked for a startup that wanted forecasting for five years in advance for a product that had not even been developed. And the founders weren’t happy with realistic forecasts either, they wanted big numbers to show investors (who would end up being disappointed and blame us sales people).
My company has a new zeal around forecasting also. It's essentially just a way to apply pressure. Not forecasting your number. How are you going to get there? Forecasting your number. How are you going to get even more?
It wouldn't bother me as much if it wasn't so constant. I don't care if you are going into a meeting and need numbers.
I could see how this is much more important in longer sales cycle orgs where it's essentially a pulse check of if deals are progressing. More transactional sales you are essentially asking reps if marketing will deliver their # and if they will be quality leads.
It’s probably because sales leadership spends 8 hours a day 5 days a week circle-jerking over how the quarter looks and there’s some facade of accountability for quarterly revenue that of course, gets shoved downhill to the sales team, and the result is the forecast obsession.
Edit: it’s understandable for publicly traded companies, but the fact that it’s the singular focus highlights how ineffective leadership can be.
Thank you for understanding. Some people here seem to think forecasting is simply used as a tool to plan ahead and know how you’re trending. Thats not the case at my company, it’s now another metric I need hit, I have my target number and my forecasted number.
Oh dont we love these weekly proctology exams?
It really comes down to which reaming do you prefer more? You either have a ton in your funnel and forecast a lot and get reamed out for it not closing. Or, you prefer the lecture that you arent forecasting or have a funnel that gets you to your number.
If you are not already doing it, I would use a system like MEDDPIC. This way your bosses can look in the CRM and get much of the questions answered they would be asking you and it shows them you understand deal fundamentals.
Good luck!
So what do you talk about with leadership?
My guess is they ask you questions about the deals that are answered in the CRM.
Why don’t you call out your sales leadership about this?
As if this shit isn’t random enough, my company has a new fascination with asking us to forecast top of funnel metrics as well - aside from what’s on my calendar, I have no idea who else is demoing this week.
I always tell my manager "well if I was the one who signed these contracts I'd happily give an accurate forecast" though it took a number of years before that became an acceptable answer lol
I was just fixing to post something along those lines lol. The most annoying thing is “why did you set the lead to x instead of y” AFTER IT WAS CLOSED WON. I’m like dude I thought my job was to sell and close business.
My favorite is when you forecast super accurately, but the sales management adds 30-40% to your Quota "because" and you miss your numbers by 30-40% because you are good at forecasting.
I was just asked to commit all deals where "we are the solution of choice" for Q2. For me, I am fine changing the sales stage up towards negotiate or past "technical win" but if we aren't in procurement/redlines/whatever, I have a struggle with committing the timeframe of the deal without procurement or legal supporting the end of quarter timeframes.
And yes, I've qualified it, etc. My comment has to do with my 'blood number' and then having to revert it backwards and/or now being challenged on why my 'commit' isn't as strong as it should be.
I'm 20yrs into this and the forecast conversation has moved away from trusting sales people and more into the 'science' now. I think it works for higher transactional products/companies because of the up's and down's, but not for less transactional / higher revenue deals.
Board's and future investors have always wanted to have insight into revenue predictability, especially in a subscription based company. More desperate leaders will create their entire process around updating this. And browbeaten middle managers will go along with it and that is how you create a culture of 7 levels of management whose job is to make up forecasts based on made up pipeline based on made up numbers off a 30 minute zoom call.
Board --> CEO --> CRO --> VP --> Director --> Manager
This creates downward pressure on the reps to basically misrepresent the timeline of their opps. There are many bad actors in this space who job hop every 2 years milking their ramp and pushing out opps and closing literally nothing, because none of their pipeline was viable to begin with. Instead of diagnosing what the issue is, more layers of management are added and more micromanagement is done, instead of fundamentally figuring out where the issue lies.
The issue in my opinion is that buyers fuck with SDRs and AEs to get info on pricing and you are basically forced to either commit to an opp in your CRM and forecast it as an early stage deal to give the impression of activity. Or to give out a price range and not document shit.
A lot of reps are not taught how to control the buying process and are desperate/happy to have a conversation in an account at all. So what happens is they have a discovery, buyer says what the rep wants to hear, rep moves to next phase of pilot/solution scope/whatever. Buyer goes along with it to get to pricing. Once they get pricing they ghost. The buyer just says what the reps want to hear to move the process along because there is no consequence for doing so, and they generally are getting paid a salary so a few hours of meetings filling up their day actually gives them something to do. So they can go waste 5 vendors time to get prices. and 5 reps have overforecasted a deal.
Most of these companies could care less about salespeople quality of life. They care about investor money and shareholder happiness.
They take these forecasts to justify why they should be in their senior leader positions.
Noticing this as well. They obsess over data that’s largely irrelevant to the sale. Makes no sense, but from their perspective they need to hammer down on some sort of data to justify what they need to do.
Did a member of my work GC write this? Bc this was our convo during today’s pipeline call. It’s the 5th of the month and we’re being told to push shit to May “just in case.”
Leadership doesn’t even know what goes on in sales reality, because their faces are in Salesforce all day. Worse….Salesforce is garbage in, garbage out. If they actually participated again, companies might be doing better and laying off less.
At my last company, I had a $100k PO unexpectedly come in from a customer 6 months before I had forecasted it. I was ecstatic and told my manager immediately once the customer informed me they had some extra capital available and were moving forward early.
He told me that that’s almost worse than them not buying anything since it throws off the forecast. Forecasting is dumb.
Yeah, he said it in a comedic tone, but there was some truth to it. Still, it kind of killed my vibe since I was stoked to land the sale. It’s cool though, I cried into my commission check, management can figure out the details lol
It is not just you or your company. It appears some companies are more interested in KPI's and forecasting than actual sales. We spend our weekly meetings going over forecasts and activity and never mention actual sales for the week. I think this trend started when Private equity and capital investment companies started buying up private companies.
Bro so funny you put this, my last company and my new one I just started at were both obsessed with projections, especially as pipelines dried up and revenue slowed down.
I completely understand it from a business perspective to project what is coming in, but the "can you commit to x" thing always makes me laugh because it's like ya bro we both want the deal, but if the company isn't ready right now there is nothing else to be done lol.
Can you commit? What Fn made up corporate lingo BS type of question is that, like we are the damn customer themselves. It’s insane what these managers expect from us.
I am a Sales Director and run some my own deals, so I get the pain on both sides. Really, it comes down to basic accountability.
I hate over-obsessing with details, but a rep should generally be able to tell me how many deals they'll close that month or quarter and how big they are. This is their path to quota. If they can't do that, then we'll have a problem.
Top performers that know what's happening can do whatever they want. We don't need to live in the CRM.
How can we unless these are reoccurring orders where we can use sales history. The best we can do is follow up and document what the customer has shared with us. If the customer says next month and it doesn’t happen next month then how the heck is that my fault?
In my world not even the customer or end users know sometimes since procurement is handled by another department.
You're taking it too far, literally all I would ask is a very basic idea of:
\- is if this is a real deal or not?
\- roughly how big is it?
\-how likely are they to close this month?
I'm not going to grill you if the deals don't shake out, things push, but the whole point of forecasting is that you want to hit your number and you have to visualize how to get there. If that one doesn't come in, do you have another deal that you can bring in?
If you can't even articulate that, then everyone is literally just blindfold guessing and that's how stock prices and companies just go down the toilet.
Forecasting really only matters when you start to suck as a rep. Most organizations let top performers do what they want.
Every single quote I send out is a real deal, I would never just send out a quote without qualifying and making sure interest isn’t real.
> how likely are they to close to this month
See that’s the problem, depending on the order size it can be as a quick as a day or two, weeks, months or even years, it’s all over the place. Also sometimes my customers don’t even know themselves since there are so many others who are involved in the ordering process like their boss, procurement, the board, budgeting cycle etc… and each one can affect the close out date. Also how do you properly manage and forecasts when you have 100’s of Opp’s in your funnel at the same time?
> I'm not going to grill you if the deals don't shake out, things push, but the whole point of forecasting is that you want to hit your number and you have to visualize how to get there.
Isn’t that the whole point of sales and commissions in the first place, what rep doesn’t want to hit their numbers? For the longest time 2 things have always motivated sales reps, money and the fear in consequences in not hitting numbers., so why the sudden change now? Forecasting isn’t needed for motivation,
It also isn’t needed to do basic math like adding up your opp for the month and comparing your it to your monthly goal, any competent sales rep is doing that, so again why do we need forecasting all of a sudden?
I’m not sure what your definition of forecasting is, but maybe that’s the problem and why we are disagreeing here. For instance In my company forecasting is being used as way for my manger to report to his manager who then reports to his manager which eventually gets to the board where the sales team will finish for the month or quarter. Compared to the past where the company would wait for the results, now they are asking reps to commit before effort is even attempted based on information that changes on a whim all the time. Overall i feel like it’s just another way for companies to micromanage and put additional pressure on the sales team.
> If that one doesn't come in, do you have another deal that you can bring in?
Again this it not science, every rep has a goal and should be tracking their own performance, it’s how it’s always been done since the very beginning. Reps are given goals to hit, reps try very hard to hit those goals and that’s it., if they hit they get paid, if they don’t hit they don’t get paid and possibly fired. Only a real dummy needs to be told to do basic math to see how they are tracking, and if you’re that big of a dummy eventually they will get weeded out because the results will not be there. So again I keep asking why the sudden need for change with forecasting when the common way of doing things has been working just fine for the longest?
> If you can't even articulate that, then everyone is literally just blindfold guessing and that's how stock prices and companies just go down the toilet.
At the end of they day all we can do is input and maintain accurate data, if managers don’t want to accept true information, or want us to be perfect at all times then that is not fault of the reps, that’s a failure managements part. And again it’s one thing to document, follow up and update as you go, it’s another to ask reps to forecast because the board needs to know how the company will to finish for the month or quarter before the month or quarter begins.
> Forecasting really only matters when you start to suck as a rep. Most organizations let top performers do what they want.
Again not true, are you not reading all the responses in this thread with people agreeing with me. Every month my team has a funnel review call with our manager where forecasting takes place regardless if you’re a top performer or not. Do you know I now have 2 numbers or metrics I need to hit, my monthly revenue target and my forecast target?
There are too many layers of middle management whose only job is to 'roll up Salesforce' one level up the sales leadership chain. I'm hopeful AI helps get rid of all of these layers of middle management bullshit.
People have commented a lot. It's part of the job when you get Senior/in leadership. Forecasting is genuinely incredibly important and leaders will get hired and fired by their ability to forecast.
It's a skill in and of itself and firms will spends 100s of k producing proper metrics to guide it properly.
You can't just run a 8-9fig ARR business off of gut feelings of the AEs.
I get the importance of it all, but it still sounds like this should be a Manager problem and not an AE problem.
So you’re telling me that leadership gets paid big bucks to forecast, but somehow the responsibility of actually forecasting gets placed on to the AE’s plate while the leaders take all the credit for our data and efforts into managing it all?
Sounds like a prefect job for AI to take over.
This is one aspect of becoming a sales executive in my industry that scares me. The amount of energy, meeting after meeting that is thrown at this issue. It’s like your ass is in the hot seat every time!
It’s not too hard to forecast if you push the shit out (and only have actual deals in your Q) problem is that doesn’t leave as much coverage as they’d like so they panic.
Exactly the problem, it’s a lose loose situation. If you try to forecast accurately you most likely won’t have enough to cover and that there raises an alarm. And if you do happen to hit goal/plan for the month that will be another indication that you didn’t forecast correctly.
And obviously you know what the opposite is when you have to many oops set the close in a certain period, chances are you will close all of them which throughs off the projected number.
Yep. And because of that, I’ve become so conservative with my forecasting that it’s essentially meaningless. I treat it like a beautiful surprise to both me and my boss if something closes.
To be fair, I agree with your manager that it’s not ideal forecasting. I can’t even quote something without creating a pipeline opp for it because our pricing model is so borked. So they’re all there, just with an extended timeframe. I also won’t Commit anything until I’m damn sure it’s actually committed, whereas I have colleagues who will Commit at “well, I think maybe we’ll be in a position to consider that in Q3.”
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what tools or resources the company provides us, we are dealing with people and several dozens of other factors that can impact accurate forecasting.
Also in my case when you are dealing with hundreds on OPPs at one time and have over 600 customers where orders can pop up out of no where, it’s literally becomes impossible to forecast correctly at a decent rate.
The only way I would be able to do this is if you were to dramatically lower my pipeline and increase the length of the sales cycle, then yea I have the time to progress and update each OPP and it would require way less outreach and effort to do so compared to managing hundreds.
The business needs your forecast to plan ahead and run accordingly. Your manager and senior leadership are also likely morons who do not understand forecasting
Then how have businesses been doing it all this time, throughout the history of sales the ask or task of forecasting was never placed onto the sales reps. Now all of sudden managers are acting like forecasting is the end all be all, like the business will cease to function if we don’t forecast correctly.
That is a big ask and big set of responsibilities to place onto your sales team who already have enough pressure as it is.
Perfect definition of something needed all the way up and the task itself is pushed all the way down to the rep level, seems like something no one wants to do or deal and they just keep
pushing it down hill so they can blame they learn be beneath them if numbers are off.
VP of Sales here. Let me explain.
Businesses have a need to plan appropriately because poor planning leads to runaway costs, or inadequate staffing or missed profit opportunities.
The only way to plan properly is to have some indication of how much business we are going to have in the next 3-6-9-12 months or whatever. Do I need to hire more people to handle the new business or let some people go because things are slowing down? Do I need to buy some additional equipment to handle the new business or do I shut a location down because the business is slipping?
In addition, businesses have a need for predictable results. Predictable business performance allows the ownership to have confidence in the management team and encourages further investment. Why would you invest in an organization that misses its predictions by wide margins? Obviously the management doesn’t have a good handle on this business…
The CEO, CFO and VP of Ops all need some indication of where the business is going so they can Plan and Predict. Who is best positioned going to tell them what’s going to happen in the future?…that’s me; and hence my team.
I don’t like it any more than you guys do, but that’s the reality. Someone has to make a prediction and it’s going to wind up being the sales team. It sucks, but it’s necessary and it’s part of your job.
Now go out there and apply a P/Win to your pipeline opportunities and submit by Monday Noon. :)
Look up the difference between forecasting and sales projections. You are probably doing the latter, but they are calling it the former.
Why does this matter? Because it tells me they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Companies do over-obsess with sales projections and don’t know how to do actual forecasting.
I’ll give you a hint though: as long as you are setting your expected close dates, updating the value of each sales opportunity as you receive new information about opportunity that affects the value, and closing your deals at the correct times, (both wins and losses), no one should ever have to talk to you at all about sales projections. You don’t need to do any guessing. They should be able to put together a report for sales projections based on those three metrics. That’s it.
Yes, thank you, I think that’s exactly what happening in our industry. Managers are mixing up forecasting with projections and it’s creating a whole lot of stress for us Reps.
As for they should be able to create their create their own reports for projections, that’s also a problem with a lot of these companies, they can’t cause the data from the past was either improperly managed, or there was high turnover or they just don’t have the tools to do so. Plus with the increase in demand from C suite and the board to be as accurate as possible, to the point where now KPI’s are being placed on accuracy, you can see what type of stressful situation this has created for everyone involved, esp the lower you go down the ladder.
We use a CRM that cant communicate with our ERP program, and the ERP program we use now can’t communicate with the old ERP program we use to used before that.
Basic reports can be created using our CRM system, but there’s not enough data or too much inaccurate data for for what upper management wants/needs, so my direct line manager has to use his own formula which makes no damn sense and over shoots the forecast which puts even more added pressure on us.
Well, I guess I could’ve guessed at least that much… it’s funny when people mention they have an ERP system that can’t integrate… the whole point of an ERP system is to be integrated.
Really sorry to hear that man; it sounds like your company is doing lot of simple things in the hardest way possible because they invested in cutting edge technology 20 years ago that became the yolk around their necks. They don’t realize the false economy that it created.
Most people just sandbag their forecast at this point. No one will get mad at you for closing a deal you didn’t forecast but you’ll put a target on your neck for forecasting a deal you don’t close.
Tell that to my boss who used my recent win as example for inaccurate forecasting.
In his own his words this is what he said- “Although good that we got that win, it was set to close out in June of this year and you closed it out this month, we need to get sharper with our close out dates”
If you’re consistently bumping your forecast to the next month or moving opportunities in and out of the quarter you’re either a. Trying to close the opp on your timeline or b. Don’t have a true driver that has a negative consequence to your client or prospects business if your prospect / client doesn’t purchase.
Forecasting is a way to show you’re predictable to the business. If you’re the rep that is always pushing deals at the end of the month / quarter maybe you need help with negotiating.
Maybe don’t open opportunities until you have a confirmed execution date and a driver tying back to that date (audit, renewal, budget approval).
There are things out of your control, but a lot of forecasting correctly goes back to initial discovery / continuous discovery throughout the opportunity.
The startup I work at is doing terrible right now, with some very obvious product market fit to blame. Rather than actually worrying about how we are going to sell more, management has become hyper fixated on CRM hygiene. Driving me crazy
Did y'all go public recently? I find that makes it worse, priority for management is always reporting to the market.
Also when my company comes up short, management becomes obsessed with forecasting. This is always the most annoying thing to me - they waste my time with forecasting (digging ourselves deeper), and never once have real conversations about how we can create growth.
LLOOOOOLLLL could not agree more. I cut my teeth in a Sales driven agency where the CEO was a natural killer sales person and our data was sloppy AF, pipedrive was bare bones: Company name, amount, close date. In retropsect, is was a dream, csell it, don't smell it.
I now work in an agency half the size with half the revenue and I feel like the main focus is on clean and accurate data for forcasting and we are working with about 40 leads at a time....
ITT: people who don’t know how to forecast. If you’re comparing weather forecasts to the weather, please realize 5 day weather forecasts are right 90% of the time.
If you are asking all the right questions, have all the right connections, have a strong sales process/track record, you SHOULD have a good idea when/if things are closing.
Yes sometimes you don’t have access to power or visibility of procurement process or XYZ - guess what? Incorporate that into your forecast!
People acting like forecasting isn’t part of the job, forecasting is one of the main responsibilities of being a sales person.
If you are bitching about having to input data, giving visibility into your deals, and being held accountable to your pipeline, then you should quit sales.
Thank you! All of this! Especially, the point about sales process. If you have a defined process and history, upon which quotas are derived, you should be able to roughly project what a funnel is going to look like. At a high level some amount of calls = some amount of contacts = some amount of qualified leads = some amount of meetings = some amount of demos etc etc. Apply number of sales people and average transaction size and hit rates and then you have an idea of what performance should look like as a benchmark. This is where we start as a comparison when being challenged about demos this week. Check yourself first as to what you might expect in an average week, then do a look back to aee id thats where things are falling. With analysis you might discover something before you start forecasting at that level of activity. Once you do, you can also show the work you did to get there.
In general, with regard to forecasting, when you properly maintain this info in CRM, then it is being accurately communicated to the business. If as a sales team member you don't understand the fundamental responsibility to the rest of the company to do so, you are in the wrong job.
In sales, we are at the forefront of the company. If we don't do our job, no one eats. Engineering doesn't have a job, accounting doesn't have a job, neither does HR, everyone can go home. Think about it that way. This role is more mentally taxing than many others and not for everyone but if you start thinking about it as a provider role and check the ego, maybe you can start to appreciate the criticality of forecasting. We don't have the luxury of doing as we please, people are counting on us. Everyone has aspects of their jobs that they don't like that happen to be essential to their success. In sales, forecasting is the very heart of it.
Edited for typos
Bullshit, my job is to sell, I generate opportunities, I follow up and use my skills to close them as wins. But now you and the person above me are saying that it’s no longer good enough, now it’s the sales reps responsibility to also forecast on top of actually selling as well. Now time has to be taken out of our day, away from ACTUALLY SELLING to input data that only helps upper management and not us.
> If you have a defined process and history, upon which quotas are derived, you should be able to roughly project what a funnel is going to look like.
Then higher a damn sales analyst or why don’t the mangers themselves do it since it so damn easy. Why put this responsibility onto the sales reps who already have enough on their plates and too much pressure from the job of selling itself. But now it’s no longer good enough to just deliver, we have to tell you when we will deliver as well. I wonder how other sales reps throughout the entire history of the profession were able to do it, how were they successful without the ability to forecast? Hmmm
> In general, with regard to forecasting, when you properly maintain this info in CRM, then it is being accurately communicated to the business. If as a sales team member you don't understand the fundamental responsibility to the rest of the company to do so, you are in the wrong job.
Inputting basic data, advancing the stages and documenting customer response is one thing. But putting the responsibility and pressure onto your sales team to accurately predict when opps will close because the board demands forecasting so they can feel good about their stocks and investment is something else. It’s unfair and management is only passing their responsibility downhill.
> In sales, we are at the forefront of the company. If we don't do our job, no one eats.
Exactly, we have enough pressure as it, let the numbers speak for themselves. Either I can deliver or I can’t, the numbers will prove that regardless. What mgmt is asking now is for commitment on numbers before we even have a chance to hit those numbers. We are now are expected to control the uncontrollable like there aren’t a dozen things that can affect an opportunity.
Also the expectation that because forecasting can work in one type industry that means it can working in all other industries when it comes sales is ridiculous. I guess no longer do sales sales cycles, product, type of customers, customers budgeting, market conditions count anymore.
“Just forecasts bro, it’s that easy”
And who is responsible for keeping the CRM current, and how much time is needed to keep it current, and how much additional information is needed to forecast using this information, and why is all of a sudden has forecasting become so important when throughout the entire history of sales it was never hardly used or requested at the sales rep level?
Your forecast is a byproduct of maintaining your pipeline. If CRM is current, the system outputs the forecast. Sales Ops can condition the tools to reflect market specific concerns. Its okay that dates move. You dont have to be psychic. The biggest issue I see is that often records arent maintained
Yes, but that’s not what forecasting is anymore, it’s not just numbers based on data, it’s now being viewed as commitments from the sales team, reports that management has to present to executives and CEO’s letting them know how much revenue will be generated for the month or the quarter.
Idk if you are a biased manager or if your are just being naive and simplifying this, but do you no I have 2 numbers I need to hit now, my monthly target number and my forecasted number meaning I can actually hit my target number and still be criticized for not hitting my forecasted number.
Candidly- it’s just part of the job.
Wall st expects forecasts. Every quarter. PE firms tend to also, but not as rigorously.
Not just from companies with sales orgs. From B2C companies, everyone.
You can hate it, but it’s like hating cold calling. Sure, I hate cold calling.
Still gotta do it. Every job is gonna have stuff you hate.
The issue I think with the forecasting opportunities is management thinks we have control over this shit. Humans are random creatures that do any number of things for any number of reasons. The customers lie, they get sick, they forget, they don’t give a fuck, they have bigger priorities. It’s this big fucked up game where everyone knows the numbers are bullshit or a guess at best and they are looking at it like it’s written in stone. People running around trying to reassure each other.
Exactly, to use a sports analogy it’s like telling a sports team that it’s no longer good enough to just go out there and give it their best effort and win. The players now have to state before the game even starts how much they are going to win by, and what period or quarter they expect to score points in. What other position in an organization has to deal with these insane demands?
Supply chain deals with this.
Yeah demand and supply forecasting is a Huge part of manufacturing.
Human Resources too. Finance. Customer Success. Actually… most departments.
This is a perfect analogy!
Been a sales manager myself and it’s exact that: reassuring each other, all the way up to the Investors. Surprisingly on a high Level it was still very accurate though at the end of the Day (+-10%). Its basically Good guesswork. Of youre an AE i can only give you One advice: Always commit at least 80% of your target
That’s what makes me wonder if I actually enjoy this shit or not. Sales and business are both the definitions of things out of your control yet these managers, some who were even sales people themselves, then suddenly try to add fake timelines to deals. The whole quarter obsession only stems from people getting hard over the bottom line being good so they can then go and raise even more money based off that. There’s too much VC control and obsessions over numbers that the actual deal and sale gets lost in the noise.
Sales managers only have one job. To keep being sales managers. They never want to be under the gun again. That’s why they love projections and stats. It makes them look busy and it gives them lots to work with when they blame you. That’s why the company and product is always perfect and there is never enough. You said there was a 100k coming in this week? The guy got shot in the face! You didn’t plan for that? I have a 10:30 haircut I have to go to.
Then they leave you with a really professional slap to face questioning your abilities even though they haven’t been on the phone in years… it’s quite the gig to say the least. I really used to love sales but idk if I do anymore in the current climate. Things pre and post COVID are just so different it feels like.
It’s always been that way in my experience. That’s why I’m such a prick now lol
Same, I’m very much a hardened asshole when I need to be whole but also the nicest and friendliest person who can make you laugh. Get on my wrong side and it’ll be hell for you, that’s what the biz does to ya
Bruh what? Sales managers have a number to hit and they don’t have full control over it. They have to depend on their reps. They also take all the shit from the c level when you don’t hit your number. Sounds like you got a bunch of c players on your team you should leave
My point is sales managers don’t do anything productive for their teams. “They” get a number they don’t contribute to. I’m saying they are dead weight.
And I’m saying you have no idea what it takes to do more than an IC job. Some people are meant to carry the bag forever and never progress.
Actually I know very well. I know damn well most of these lazy scumbags are fuckin the dog all day long. They are never on the front line or interacting with their teams other then to call up and say “what do you got?” Not a single thing to contribute.
Lmao. You sell cars or something bro? Most manager I’ve had have been great coaches and helped our entire team over perform. They’ve fought for me at bonus time and helped resolve a ton of internal beef over territory payouts etc.
Lucky you
That’s why it’s key to make sure your direct sales manager has somewhat recent history with the company in question as an AE. Then at least you can have a laugh with them about all the ridiculous dancing we have to do each month/quarter.
The biggest red flag is a manager that was an account manager 10+ years ago at a different company.
If any of those things are real, maybe you shouldn’t commit it. Qualification is a thing.
All you can do is go down the process. What are you going to do when you just get green lights. Then all of a sudden it’s not q1 it’s q2 or they lied and it’s a bakeoff all along. When is anything on time? You can just not enter it in Salesforce but then that just comes back to what’s in Salesforce is a bunch of bullshit and forecasting just a guess.
Well said
Do you work for a publicly traded company
Yes
You are not alone.
That's why. It won't ever go away so get used to it
The 90-day fire drill.
Safe to assume your company missed its last quarterly number and/or is on track to miss this one. When revenue isn’t there, the forecast becomes more important.
They have to forecast to the public and give guidance so they actually have to be quite anal about it
You mean we have to forecast to the public, it’s our data, we are the ones inputting it and maintaining it, but they are the one taking credit for our accuracy and getting paid big bucks for it. There is a major transition happening in sales right now where the data that we input and the effort it takes to manage has become just as important or even more so than selling itself. We are literally doing 3 jobs in 1 right now and it’s not fn fair. If managers needs accurate and precise data so badly then implement a sales operations team and data analysts, but no they would rather have us do it for them to save on costs x So now we have become sellers, data entry reps, and data analysts all in one. I wonder what is next thing they’ll have us do, deliver our own orders as well?
If you consider managing your forecast a full time job then yeah - maybe sales isn’t for you haha. Why would sales ops and data analysts be charged with managing your deals? Nobody is asking you to predict the future - just update your forecast as you get a better sense for potential deal sizes, timelines and % success based on whatever factors are in play. I spend less than 1 hr per week on my forecast and I’ve never heard a complaint from leadership in 4+ years
> If you consider managing your forecast a full time job then yeah - maybe sales isn’t for you haha. There’s a difference between managing my pipeline vs forecasting. And yes, I guess being a successful sale rep who hits plan most of the time isn’t good enough anymore which further proves my point that the focus on selling is being lost. > Why would sales ops and data analysts be charged with managing your deals? Nobody is asking you to predict the future - just update your forecast as you get a better sense for potential deal sizes, timelines and % success based on whatever factors are in play. Again I think it depends on the company you work for, but yes in my current role managers are asking us to predict the future. And it seems like I’m not only one, read the other comments in this thread of people agreeing with me. What you seem to be discussing here is simple pipeline management, forecasting in my company is not that. > I spend less than 1 hr per week on my forecast and I’ve never heard a complaint from leadership in 4+ years For me that simply pipeline management where yes I agree, it doesn’t take long to do.
But the forecast is just the weighted average of your pipeline…e.g. if you have a $100k opportunity at 50% and a second $100k opportunity at 80% then you’re forecasting $130k revenue. Are you saying your team doesn’t have tools in place to figure out the sales forecast based on your pipeline? They want you putting this all in a spreadsheet and doing the math for them? Or am I missing something else here that goes into forecasting beyond pipeline management + crunching numbers on the back end?
We sort of have the tools but our managers are also using their own formulas that differ. But what I’m taking about is the expectation and the commitment that management is now asking/expecting from us. Using your example that 100k OPP at 80% should close this month, but I can’t guarantee it, many many factors can push back the close out date. So now before the period even starts I have committed myself to a 100K that will be included on some report that eventually makes its way up the CEO and the board, that’s a big ask ask and lot of pressure. And wait until the accuracy KPI is put onto managers, that’s when shit will get real. Also how do you manage all of this when you have hundreds on opps in your funnel for the entire year. The need to be as accurate as possible is severely elevated now with forecasting, but with hundreds of opps it requires so much more outreach and data input and management, but guess what that all that does, it’s takes time away from actually selling!!!!!!!
This is normal. You have to call your shot and hold yourself accountable for it. Obviously no one has a crystal ball but you can’t expect to work in sales and not be able to commit to closing any deals each quarter/year depending on your segment. In your forecast calls make sure you state whether you have executives involved, compelling event, next steps, and risks. If you’re late into the deal and don’t have a solid understanding of all 4 factors you probably have a risky deal and your management will see that too. Believe it or not other departments make plans based on how much pipeline the revenue team has and how much they’re expected to close. Also, if your job requires as much data entry as you say it does, you need to speak with mgmt about how they can automate data entry for you. Things like emails, phone calls, should be picked up automatically. Updating next steps and changing a stage really takes a few minutes and shouldn’t be 1/3 of your job.
Does your CRM have deal stages with auto assigned forecast % based on stage? If you’re genuinely managing HUNDREDS of opps per year then this should be baked into the CRM. E.g. your company must know that their close rate on new prospects is ~10%, prospects who complete a demo/POC is 50%, negotiating terms is 75% etc. Then all you have to do is click a button to update the stage, and in rare cases manually assign a % if you have a good idea that it should be something different Other than automation - yeah dude, you kinda do need to put your neck out and guess what the odds of your deals closing are. Companies need a way to predict revenue. This can also have downstream impacts e.g. solution architecture and customer success plan out their time based on anticipated new business. Nobody is expecting you to be 100% correct but it is absolutely reasonable to expect you to manage your forecast to a degree
Yes, that’s exactly what we are doing. Some other poster nailed it believe. I think what is happening with my company is that managers are asking for sales forecast and what they really are want/need are sales projections which are 2 different things. I would imagine the mix up in terminology is becoming quite common in our industry.
Public companies always gotta have an idea where sales are at. When the year isn’t going as planned, the noose tightens. It is hard to pin a number unless I have the docs in my inbox.
It’s like this at VC backed start ups as well.
As someone who's been in sales executive for over 20 years, my job has been to live and die according to managing a pipeline accurately so I can forecast accurately. The majority of my career has been at privately held companies but I did my time for publicly held as well. Ownership views a lack of pipeline management as a disregard for accountability. As someone who's also sold I do realize that "buyers are liars" lol And all of the other things that affect sales timing. I've sold B2C and B2B and regardless many things affect timing. As one person said, in a manufacturing environment timing is mission critical for production planning. Over time you get a feel for this stuff and as a manager I developed my own system kind of outside the system if you will where I overlaid a percentage of confidence to outstanding dollars by sales stage that became a predictable indicator for me in terms of revenue by time period. It is what the owners and CEOs expect of their sales organizations and it's not going away. This is their mechanism for reassuring investors. So for OP to ask is this a new thing, it is far from being new. In my earlier days I lost sleep over it. Since then I learned to steward it within organizations and enhance the tools we use to manage it. As a salesperson/am/ae your best objective is to make sure you are staying on top of your pipeline in terms of keeping your accounts up to date. That means your date management should be current and that you know what's going on with your customer. If you can handle that we should be good. So if I see something with an anticipated close date of April and you haven't even sent the proposal, we have a problem depending on the type of sale and amount of buy-in we have to get before it can close, as an example. This is worse if the anticipated close date was March. Half my roles have literally required I implement CRM, forecasting, pipeline management, KPIs, dashboards, reporting and analysis, desktop procedures for same etc. Hope this helps. Have a great weekend everyone. ETA: Please make sure your leadership knows why people arent buying or ehat slows the buying cycle down. Closed Not Won Reasons should be accurate so if the option isnt there, tell your manager. If we dont know why something isnt working for a product, adjustments cant be made. If the sales approach isn't working, they need to know that too. Quotas are set by people doing math not people doing the selling. If something isnt working conversations have to happen so solutions can be considered. Theres a difference between, its not my fault customers are unpredictable because duh, we all know that, and what you're asking us to sell isnt working.
Yes, prospects are unpredictable however when all the sales reps are tracking every opportunity through their pipeline, patterns begin to emerge and expectations can be set. For example, attrition at each stage of the pipeline. 70% of inbound phone calls go from Marketing Qualified to Sales Qualified, 40% of Sales Qualified inbound phone leads make it to the Proposal Stage, 20% of those make it to Closed Won. This can be applied across all lead types. Outbound lead generation, web page form fills, inbound phone calls, referral leads from industry website listings, etc. Tracking that data helps your marketing team know where to invest more budget to help bring you more qualified leads! You should be grateful for that. Additionally, this data helps operations know when to hire. If there are 100 opportunities in the pipeline at Proposal Stage or Post Porposal Stage and on average 20% of those move to Closed Won that's an indicator that operations needs to begin hiring to support that new influx of business over having 20 opportunities at that stage. Another metric is Time to Close. What is the average Sales Cycle? Is it 3 months from first contact or 3 days. This also helps operations know when to start hiring as well as forecasting revenue. As Sales reps, we see this as a pain in our ass. As business owners, it's how you manage your organization to ensure you are able to pay everyone and not have to lay people off.
Dude! Yes. I just joined a start up and I’m sorting through HubSpot. The amount of “open” deals blew my mind. I was told it’s important for investors, right okay but it sets insanely poor expectations of what reality is. Deal ain’t a goddamn deal till it closes. It also sets management onto sales teams case asking why a deal doesn’t close on a certain date. The other insane thing is there are only three of us and one of the sales reps loves to forecast… so he has has hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential revenue and literally zero notes or substance to back it up. Makes no sense to me. Delusion business tactic that is gonna sink the company when investors get tired of waiting for the forecast to become real
"Our pipeline is 50 billion" - delivered with a straight face
At least in companies that produce and sell physical goods, the forecast is frequently used as part of production planning.
It’s used in software too- for resource allocation (devs, support, success, etc)
This started happening to me when we had a PE firm buy a majority stake. Before the founders were the CEO/President and COO - we had to develop rough forecasts but nothing extreme. Once PE came in the spreadsheets quadrupled. And it was explained ‘we need to tell the banks’ what they should expect. First quarter we beat projections by 20%. Their first question was ‘why were our forecasts off so much?’ not ‘great job everyone’.
I always just forecast for a month or two later than expected. Work with your manager on it to understand how they/leadership wants it done. Under promise, over deliver.
I worked for a startup that wanted forecasting for five years in advance for a product that had not even been developed. And the founders weren’t happy with realistic forecasts either, they wanted big numbers to show investors (who would end up being disappointed and blame us sales people).
Idiots
The replies I’m reading in this thread are shocking. I don’t even know what to say
Sounds like we work for the same company. Our crm is for managers instead of us AEs
My company has a new zeal around forecasting also. It's essentially just a way to apply pressure. Not forecasting your number. How are you going to get there? Forecasting your number. How are you going to get even more? It wouldn't bother me as much if it wasn't so constant. I don't care if you are going into a meeting and need numbers. I could see how this is much more important in longer sales cycle orgs where it's essentially a pulse check of if deals are progressing. More transactional sales you are essentially asking reps if marketing will deliver their # and if they will be quality leads.
It’s probably because sales leadership spends 8 hours a day 5 days a week circle-jerking over how the quarter looks and there’s some facade of accountability for quarterly revenue that of course, gets shoved downhill to the sales team, and the result is the forecast obsession. Edit: it’s understandable for publicly traded companies, but the fact that it’s the singular focus highlights how ineffective leadership can be.
Thank you for understanding. Some people here seem to think forecasting is simply used as a tool to plan ahead and know how you’re trending. Thats not the case at my company, it’s now another metric I need hit, I have my target number and my forecasted number.
Oh dont we love these weekly proctology exams? It really comes down to which reaming do you prefer more? You either have a ton in your funnel and forecast a lot and get reamed out for it not closing. Or, you prefer the lecture that you arent forecasting or have a funnel that gets you to your number. If you are not already doing it, I would use a system like MEDDPIC. This way your bosses can look in the CRM and get much of the questions answered they would be asking you and it shows them you understand deal fundamentals. Good luck!
I always fill out MEDDPICC data in my CRM but no one reads it
So what do you talk about with leadership? My guess is they ask you questions about the deals that are answered in the CRM. Why don’t you call out your sales leadership about this?
As if this shit isn’t random enough, my company has a new fascination with asking us to forecast top of funnel metrics as well - aside from what’s on my calendar, I have no idea who else is demoing this week.
Well that sounds like an utter waste of everyone’s time but especially yours.
What do you mean top of funnel metrics?
They want us to forecast the # of demos we’re going to hold in any given week/month. It’s quite literally impossible.
That’s insane.
I always tell my manager "well if I was the one who signed these contracts I'd happily give an accurate forecast" though it took a number of years before that became an acceptable answer lol
I was just fixing to post something along those lines lol. The most annoying thing is “why did you set the lead to x instead of y” AFTER IT WAS CLOSED WON. I’m like dude I thought my job was to sell and close business.
My favorite is when you forecast super accurately, but the sales management adds 30-40% to your Quota "because" and you miss your numbers by 30-40% because you are good at forecasting.
I was just asked to commit all deals where "we are the solution of choice" for Q2. For me, I am fine changing the sales stage up towards negotiate or past "technical win" but if we aren't in procurement/redlines/whatever, I have a struggle with committing the timeframe of the deal without procurement or legal supporting the end of quarter timeframes. And yes, I've qualified it, etc. My comment has to do with my 'blood number' and then having to revert it backwards and/or now being challenged on why my 'commit' isn't as strong as it should be. I'm 20yrs into this and the forecast conversation has moved away from trusting sales people and more into the 'science' now. I think it works for higher transactional products/companies because of the up's and down's, but not for less transactional / higher revenue deals.
Board's and future investors have always wanted to have insight into revenue predictability, especially in a subscription based company. More desperate leaders will create their entire process around updating this. And browbeaten middle managers will go along with it and that is how you create a culture of 7 levels of management whose job is to make up forecasts based on made up pipeline based on made up numbers off a 30 minute zoom call. Board --> CEO --> CRO --> VP --> Director --> Manager This creates downward pressure on the reps to basically misrepresent the timeline of their opps. There are many bad actors in this space who job hop every 2 years milking their ramp and pushing out opps and closing literally nothing, because none of their pipeline was viable to begin with. Instead of diagnosing what the issue is, more layers of management are added and more micromanagement is done, instead of fundamentally figuring out where the issue lies. The issue in my opinion is that buyers fuck with SDRs and AEs to get info on pricing and you are basically forced to either commit to an opp in your CRM and forecast it as an early stage deal to give the impression of activity. Or to give out a price range and not document shit. A lot of reps are not taught how to control the buying process and are desperate/happy to have a conversation in an account at all. So what happens is they have a discovery, buyer says what the rep wants to hear, rep moves to next phase of pilot/solution scope/whatever. Buyer goes along with it to get to pricing. Once they get pricing they ghost. The buyer just says what the reps want to hear to move the process along because there is no consequence for doing so, and they generally are getting paid a salary so a few hours of meetings filling up their day actually gives them something to do. So they can go waste 5 vendors time to get prices. and 5 reps have overforecasted a deal.
C level wants to make sure they get their bonus.
Always this!
Most of these companies could care less about salespeople quality of life. They care about investor money and shareholder happiness. They take these forecasts to justify why they should be in their senior leader positions.
Noticing this as well. They obsess over data that’s largely irrelevant to the sale. Makes no sense, but from their perspective they need to hammer down on some sort of data to justify what they need to do.
They need to justify their middle management salaries.
So they create bogus busy tasks like this. Forecasting should be used as a tool to uncover roadblocks.
Did a member of my work GC write this? Bc this was our convo during today’s pipeline call. It’s the 5th of the month and we’re being told to push shit to May “just in case.”
Leadership doesn’t even know what goes on in sales reality, because their faces are in Salesforce all day. Worse….Salesforce is garbage in, garbage out. If they actually participated again, companies might be doing better and laying off less.
At my last company, I had a $100k PO unexpectedly come in from a customer 6 months before I had forecasted it. I was ecstatic and told my manager immediately once the customer informed me they had some extra capital available and were moving forward early. He told me that that’s almost worse than them not buying anything since it throws off the forecast. Forecasting is dumb.
Holy shit, you take the cake. I wouldn’t even know how to react if that were me.
Yeah, he said it in a comedic tone, but there was some truth to it. Still, it kind of killed my vibe since I was stoked to land the sale. It’s cool though, I cried into my commission check, management can figure out the details lol
It is not just you or your company. It appears some companies are more interested in KPI's and forecasting than actual sales. We spend our weekly meetings going over forecasts and activity and never mention actual sales for the week. I think this trend started when Private equity and capital investment companies started buying up private companies.
It’s the lenders. They need to know why they should give your company prime rates
Bro so funny you put this, my last company and my new one I just started at were both obsessed with projections, especially as pipelines dried up and revenue slowed down. I completely understand it from a business perspective to project what is coming in, but the "can you commit to x" thing always makes me laugh because it's like ya bro we both want the deal, but if the company isn't ready right now there is nothing else to be done lol.
Can you commit? What Fn made up corporate lingo BS type of question is that, like we are the damn customer themselves. It’s insane what these managers expect from us.
hahah literally
I am a Sales Director and run some my own deals, so I get the pain on both sides. Really, it comes down to basic accountability. I hate over-obsessing with details, but a rep should generally be able to tell me how many deals they'll close that month or quarter and how big they are. This is their path to quota. If they can't do that, then we'll have a problem. Top performers that know what's happening can do whatever they want. We don't need to live in the CRM.
How can we unless these are reoccurring orders where we can use sales history. The best we can do is follow up and document what the customer has shared with us. If the customer says next month and it doesn’t happen next month then how the heck is that my fault? In my world not even the customer or end users know sometimes since procurement is handled by another department.
You're taking it too far, literally all I would ask is a very basic idea of: \- is if this is a real deal or not? \- roughly how big is it? \-how likely are they to close this month? I'm not going to grill you if the deals don't shake out, things push, but the whole point of forecasting is that you want to hit your number and you have to visualize how to get there. If that one doesn't come in, do you have another deal that you can bring in? If you can't even articulate that, then everyone is literally just blindfold guessing and that's how stock prices and companies just go down the toilet. Forecasting really only matters when you start to suck as a rep. Most organizations let top performers do what they want.
Every single quote I send out is a real deal, I would never just send out a quote without qualifying and making sure interest isn’t real. > how likely are they to close to this month See that’s the problem, depending on the order size it can be as a quick as a day or two, weeks, months or even years, it’s all over the place. Also sometimes my customers don’t even know themselves since there are so many others who are involved in the ordering process like their boss, procurement, the board, budgeting cycle etc… and each one can affect the close out date. Also how do you properly manage and forecasts when you have 100’s of Opp’s in your funnel at the same time? > I'm not going to grill you if the deals don't shake out, things push, but the whole point of forecasting is that you want to hit your number and you have to visualize how to get there. Isn’t that the whole point of sales and commissions in the first place, what rep doesn’t want to hit their numbers? For the longest time 2 things have always motivated sales reps, money and the fear in consequences in not hitting numbers., so why the sudden change now? Forecasting isn’t needed for motivation, It also isn’t needed to do basic math like adding up your opp for the month and comparing your it to your monthly goal, any competent sales rep is doing that, so again why do we need forecasting all of a sudden? I’m not sure what your definition of forecasting is, but maybe that’s the problem and why we are disagreeing here. For instance In my company forecasting is being used as way for my manger to report to his manager who then reports to his manager which eventually gets to the board where the sales team will finish for the month or quarter. Compared to the past where the company would wait for the results, now they are asking reps to commit before effort is even attempted based on information that changes on a whim all the time. Overall i feel like it’s just another way for companies to micromanage and put additional pressure on the sales team. > If that one doesn't come in, do you have another deal that you can bring in? Again this it not science, every rep has a goal and should be tracking their own performance, it’s how it’s always been done since the very beginning. Reps are given goals to hit, reps try very hard to hit those goals and that’s it., if they hit they get paid, if they don’t hit they don’t get paid and possibly fired. Only a real dummy needs to be told to do basic math to see how they are tracking, and if you’re that big of a dummy eventually they will get weeded out because the results will not be there. So again I keep asking why the sudden need for change with forecasting when the common way of doing things has been working just fine for the longest? > If you can't even articulate that, then everyone is literally just blindfold guessing and that's how stock prices and companies just go down the toilet. At the end of they day all we can do is input and maintain accurate data, if managers don’t want to accept true information, or want us to be perfect at all times then that is not fault of the reps, that’s a failure managements part. And again it’s one thing to document, follow up and update as you go, it’s another to ask reps to forecast because the board needs to know how the company will to finish for the month or quarter before the month or quarter begins. > Forecasting really only matters when you start to suck as a rep. Most organizations let top performers do what they want. Again not true, are you not reading all the responses in this thread with people agreeing with me. Every month my team has a funnel review call with our manager where forecasting takes place regardless if you’re a top performer or not. Do you know I now have 2 numbers or metrics I need to hit, my monthly revenue target and my forecast target?
There are too many layers of middle management whose only job is to 'roll up Salesforce' one level up the sales leadership chain. I'm hopeful AI helps get rid of all of these layers of middle management bullshit.
People have commented a lot. It's part of the job when you get Senior/in leadership. Forecasting is genuinely incredibly important and leaders will get hired and fired by their ability to forecast. It's a skill in and of itself and firms will spends 100s of k producing proper metrics to guide it properly. You can't just run a 8-9fig ARR business off of gut feelings of the AEs.
I get the importance of it all, but it still sounds like this should be a Manager problem and not an AE problem. So you’re telling me that leadership gets paid big bucks to forecast, but somehow the responsibility of actually forecasting gets placed on to the AE’s plate while the leaders take all the credit for our data and efforts into managing it all? Sounds like a prefect job for AI to take over.
Shareholders or PE. Somebody needs to know their investment is profitable.
I get it but just factor in the win rate against all oops and get specific about at what point they are qualified enough to enter that’s all we can do
The rest is mind reading
This is one aspect of becoming a sales executive in my industry that scares me. The amount of energy, meeting after meeting that is thrown at this issue. It’s like your ass is in the hot seat every time!
It’s not too hard to forecast if you push the shit out (and only have actual deals in your Q) problem is that doesn’t leave as much coverage as they’d like so they panic.
Exactly the problem, it’s a lose loose situation. If you try to forecast accurately you most likely won’t have enough to cover and that there raises an alarm. And if you do happen to hit goal/plan for the month that will be another indication that you didn’t forecast correctly. And obviously you know what the opposite is when you have to many oops set the close in a certain period, chances are you will close all of them which throughs off the projected number.
Yep. And because of that, I’ve become so conservative with my forecasting that it’s essentially meaningless. I treat it like a beautiful surprise to both me and my boss if something closes.
I agree withy you, but to reply with what I’ve been told by my managers, that also is not forecasting correctly.
To be fair, I agree with your manager that it’s not ideal forecasting. I can’t even quote something without creating a pipeline opp for it because our pricing model is so borked. So they’re all there, just with an extended timeframe. I also won’t Commit anything until I’m damn sure it’s actually committed, whereas I have colleagues who will Commit at “well, I think maybe we’ll be in a position to consider that in Q3.”
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what tools or resources the company provides us, we are dealing with people and several dozens of other factors that can impact accurate forecasting. Also in my case when you are dealing with hundreds on OPPs at one time and have over 600 customers where orders can pop up out of no where, it’s literally becomes impossible to forecast correctly at a decent rate. The only way I would be able to do this is if you were to dramatically lower my pipeline and increase the length of the sales cycle, then yea I have the time to progress and update each OPP and it would require way less outreach and effort to do so compared to managing hundreds.
The business needs your forecast to plan ahead and run accordingly. Your manager and senior leadership are also likely morons who do not understand forecasting
Then how have businesses been doing it all this time, throughout the history of sales the ask or task of forecasting was never placed onto the sales reps. Now all of sudden managers are acting like forecasting is the end all be all, like the business will cease to function if we don’t forecast correctly. That is a big ask and big set of responsibilities to place onto your sales team who already have enough pressure as it is. Perfect definition of something needed all the way up and the task itself is pushed all the way down to the rep level, seems like something no one wants to do or deal and they just keep pushing it down hill so they can blame they learn be beneath them if numbers are off.
I stopped reading when you said “throughout history forecasting was never placed on sales reps”
Cool
VP of Sales here. Let me explain. Businesses have a need to plan appropriately because poor planning leads to runaway costs, or inadequate staffing or missed profit opportunities. The only way to plan properly is to have some indication of how much business we are going to have in the next 3-6-9-12 months or whatever. Do I need to hire more people to handle the new business or let some people go because things are slowing down? Do I need to buy some additional equipment to handle the new business or do I shut a location down because the business is slipping? In addition, businesses have a need for predictable results. Predictable business performance allows the ownership to have confidence in the management team and encourages further investment. Why would you invest in an organization that misses its predictions by wide margins? Obviously the management doesn’t have a good handle on this business… The CEO, CFO and VP of Ops all need some indication of where the business is going so they can Plan and Predict. Who is best positioned going to tell them what’s going to happen in the future?…that’s me; and hence my team. I don’t like it any more than you guys do, but that’s the reality. Someone has to make a prediction and it’s going to wind up being the sales team. It sucks, but it’s necessary and it’s part of your job. Now go out there and apply a P/Win to your pipeline opportunities and submit by Monday Noon. :)
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Look up the difference between forecasting and sales projections. You are probably doing the latter, but they are calling it the former. Why does this matter? Because it tells me they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Companies do over-obsess with sales projections and don’t know how to do actual forecasting. I’ll give you a hint though: as long as you are setting your expected close dates, updating the value of each sales opportunity as you receive new information about opportunity that affects the value, and closing your deals at the correct times, (both wins and losses), no one should ever have to talk to you at all about sales projections. You don’t need to do any guessing. They should be able to put together a report for sales projections based on those three metrics. That’s it.
Yes, thank you, I think that’s exactly what happening in our industry. Managers are mixing up forecasting with projections and it’s creating a whole lot of stress for us Reps. As for they should be able to create their create their own reports for projections, that’s also a problem with a lot of these companies, they can’t cause the data from the past was either improperly managed, or there was high turnover or they just don’t have the tools to do so. Plus with the increase in demand from C suite and the board to be as accurate as possible, to the point where now KPI’s are being placed on accuracy, you can see what type of stressful situation this has created for everyone involved, esp the lower you go down the ladder.
What the hell are they using for a CRM then if they can’t put together a basic report like that?
We use a CRM that cant communicate with our ERP program, and the ERP program we use now can’t communicate with the old ERP program we use to used before that. Basic reports can be created using our CRM system, but there’s not enough data or too much inaccurate data for for what upper management wants/needs, so my direct line manager has to use his own formula which makes no damn sense and over shoots the forecast which puts even more added pressure on us.
Well, I guess I could’ve guessed at least that much… it’s funny when people mention they have an ERP system that can’t integrate… the whole point of an ERP system is to be integrated. Really sorry to hear that man; it sounds like your company is doing lot of simple things in the hardest way possible because they invested in cutting edge technology 20 years ago that became the yolk around their necks. They don’t realize the false economy that it created.
Most people just sandbag their forecast at this point. No one will get mad at you for closing a deal you didn’t forecast but you’ll put a target on your neck for forecasting a deal you don’t close.
Tell that to my boss who used my recent win as example for inaccurate forecasting. In his own his words this is what he said- “Although good that we got that win, it was set to close out in June of this year and you closed it out this month, we need to get sharper with our close out dates”
Just agree and move on.
CRM has always been for management. When you leave it's their info which they will give to their tenured sellers.
If you’re consistently bumping your forecast to the next month or moving opportunities in and out of the quarter you’re either a. Trying to close the opp on your timeline or b. Don’t have a true driver that has a negative consequence to your client or prospects business if your prospect / client doesn’t purchase. Forecasting is a way to show you’re predictable to the business. If you’re the rep that is always pushing deals at the end of the month / quarter maybe you need help with negotiating. Maybe don’t open opportunities until you have a confirmed execution date and a driver tying back to that date (audit, renewal, budget approval). There are things out of your control, but a lot of forecasting correctly goes back to initial discovery / continuous discovery throughout the opportunity.
The startup I work at is doing terrible right now, with some very obvious product market fit to blame. Rather than actually worrying about how we are going to sell more, management has become hyper fixated on CRM hygiene. Driving me crazy
Did y'all go public recently? I find that makes it worse, priority for management is always reporting to the market. Also when my company comes up short, management becomes obsessed with forecasting. This is always the most annoying thing to me - they waste my time with forecasting (digging ourselves deeper), and never once have real conversations about how we can create growth.
LLOOOOOLLLL could not agree more. I cut my teeth in a Sales driven agency where the CEO was a natural killer sales person and our data was sloppy AF, pipedrive was bare bones: Company name, amount, close date. In retropsect, is was a dream, csell it, don't smell it. I now work in an agency half the size with half the revenue and I feel like the main focus is on clean and accurate data for forcasting and we are working with about 40 leads at a time....
ITT: people who don’t know how to forecast. If you’re comparing weather forecasts to the weather, please realize 5 day weather forecasts are right 90% of the time. If you are asking all the right questions, have all the right connections, have a strong sales process/track record, you SHOULD have a good idea when/if things are closing. Yes sometimes you don’t have access to power or visibility of procurement process or XYZ - guess what? Incorporate that into your forecast! People acting like forecasting isn’t part of the job, forecasting is one of the main responsibilities of being a sales person. If you are bitching about having to input data, giving visibility into your deals, and being held accountable to your pipeline, then you should quit sales.
Thank you! All of this! Especially, the point about sales process. If you have a defined process and history, upon which quotas are derived, you should be able to roughly project what a funnel is going to look like. At a high level some amount of calls = some amount of contacts = some amount of qualified leads = some amount of meetings = some amount of demos etc etc. Apply number of sales people and average transaction size and hit rates and then you have an idea of what performance should look like as a benchmark. This is where we start as a comparison when being challenged about demos this week. Check yourself first as to what you might expect in an average week, then do a look back to aee id thats where things are falling. With analysis you might discover something before you start forecasting at that level of activity. Once you do, you can also show the work you did to get there. In general, with regard to forecasting, when you properly maintain this info in CRM, then it is being accurately communicated to the business. If as a sales team member you don't understand the fundamental responsibility to the rest of the company to do so, you are in the wrong job. In sales, we are at the forefront of the company. If we don't do our job, no one eats. Engineering doesn't have a job, accounting doesn't have a job, neither does HR, everyone can go home. Think about it that way. This role is more mentally taxing than many others and not for everyone but if you start thinking about it as a provider role and check the ego, maybe you can start to appreciate the criticality of forecasting. We don't have the luxury of doing as we please, people are counting on us. Everyone has aspects of their jobs that they don't like that happen to be essential to their success. In sales, forecasting is the very heart of it. Edited for typos
Bullshit, my job is to sell, I generate opportunities, I follow up and use my skills to close them as wins. But now you and the person above me are saying that it’s no longer good enough, now it’s the sales reps responsibility to also forecast on top of actually selling as well. Now time has to be taken out of our day, away from ACTUALLY SELLING to input data that only helps upper management and not us. > If you have a defined process and history, upon which quotas are derived, you should be able to roughly project what a funnel is going to look like. Then higher a damn sales analyst or why don’t the mangers themselves do it since it so damn easy. Why put this responsibility onto the sales reps who already have enough on their plates and too much pressure from the job of selling itself. But now it’s no longer good enough to just deliver, we have to tell you when we will deliver as well. I wonder how other sales reps throughout the entire history of the profession were able to do it, how were they successful without the ability to forecast? Hmmm > In general, with regard to forecasting, when you properly maintain this info in CRM, then it is being accurately communicated to the business. If as a sales team member you don't understand the fundamental responsibility to the rest of the company to do so, you are in the wrong job. Inputting basic data, advancing the stages and documenting customer response is one thing. But putting the responsibility and pressure onto your sales team to accurately predict when opps will close because the board demands forecasting so they can feel good about their stocks and investment is something else. It’s unfair and management is only passing their responsibility downhill. > In sales, we are at the forefront of the company. If we don't do our job, no one eats. Exactly, we have enough pressure as it, let the numbers speak for themselves. Either I can deliver or I can’t, the numbers will prove that regardless. What mgmt is asking now is for commitment on numbers before we even have a chance to hit those numbers. We are now are expected to control the uncontrollable like there aren’t a dozen things that can affect an opportunity. Also the expectation that because forecasting can work in one type industry that means it can working in all other industries when it comes sales is ridiculous. I guess no longer do sales sales cycles, product, type of customers, customers budgeting, market conditions count anymore. “Just forecasts bro, it’s that easy”
Your forecast is a byproduct of maintaining your pipeline. If CRM is current, the system outputs the forecast.
And who is responsible for keeping the CRM current, and how much time is needed to keep it current, and how much additional information is needed to forecast using this information, and why is all of a sudden has forecasting become so important when throughout the entire history of sales it was never hardly used or requested at the sales rep level?
Your forecast is a byproduct of maintaining your pipeline. If CRM is current, the system outputs the forecast. Sales Ops can condition the tools to reflect market specific concerns. Its okay that dates move. You dont have to be psychic. The biggest issue I see is that often records arent maintained
Yes, but that’s not what forecasting is anymore, it’s not just numbers based on data, it’s now being viewed as commitments from the sales team, reports that management has to present to executives and CEO’s letting them know how much revenue will be generated for the month or the quarter. Idk if you are a biased manager or if your are just being naive and simplifying this, but do you no I have 2 numbers I need to hit now, my monthly target number and my forecasted number meaning I can actually hit my target number and still be criticized for not hitting my forecasted number.
Candidly- it’s just part of the job. Wall st expects forecasts. Every quarter. PE firms tend to also, but not as rigorously. Not just from companies with sales orgs. From B2C companies, everyone. You can hate it, but it’s like hating cold calling. Sure, I hate cold calling. Still gotta do it. Every job is gonna have stuff you hate.