Forecasting with Zoho CRM wasn’t easy.

Now you can create multiple and condition-based forecasts across different periods.

Businesses were limited to just a single forecast that touches all deals, but now you can create multiple forecasts, which can include all your deals or deals that match specified conditions, with a greater control of the forecast periods.

Forecasts can be created for all the available hierarchy in Zoho CRM user management:

  • Role/Reporting to
  • Territory
Forecasts can be created monthly or quarterly for the following forecast periods.
  • Current – 4 Quarters / 12 months of current fiscal year
  • Future – 4 Quarters / 12 months of the next fiscal year
  • Completed – The previous 2 fiscal years

It is a really important change. Last year it was not possible to create such forecasts.

Forecast types

Two forecasts types can be created which are based around the attribute that is used to set targets for your users:
  • Deal Revenue based forecasts – These are forecasts where the targets are based on currency fields like deal amount, expected revenue or other custom currency fields defined the deals module
  • Deal Quantity based forecasts – These are forecasts where the targets are based on system defined fields like “count of deals” and other custom number field

Introducing Best Case and Committed deals under “Forecast Category”

In the current forecasting, deals only had three forecast categories that were associated with them.
  • Closed won – Deal was marked “Won”
  • Closed lost – Deal was marked “omitted”
  • Open – Deal was marked “Pipeline”
Now open deals can be tagged with new options under the forecast category:
  • Best case – Open deals that have a high chance of being won
  • Committed – Open deals that sales reps commit to winning
Instead of generalizing all open deals as pipeline deals, this additional type gives a better picture as to where a particular sales representative stands in terms of the deals in their pipeline. This allows the administrator to make a more informed decision when setting targets for a particular user.

Zia ( Zoho CRM AI) offers target suggestions and predicts target achievement

When creating forecasts, there are two choices:
  1. they can be built from the ground up as a completely new forecast, or
  2. they can be linked and created from an existing forecast.
When creating a continuous forecast, Zia will calculate and suggest targets based on the historical data of your selected forecasts. This will be available in the forecast create page when setting targets.
The historical and current deal closure pattern of users will be analyzed as well to give you the predicted target achievement for the users. Achievement predictions will be available in the target achievement report.
I think it is one of the most expected enhancements in Zoho CRM. Finally we got it.
Zoho CRM Forecast