Sales forecasting with Zoho CRM
Now, you can create multiple and condition-based forecasts across different periods.
Businesses were limited to just a single forecast that touches all deals. Still, now you can create multiple forecasts, including all your deals or deals that match specified conditions, with greater control of the forecast periods.
Forecasts can be created for all the available hierarchies 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 two fiscal years
It is a really important change. Last year, it was not possible to create such forecasts.
Forecast types
Two forecast types can be created, which are based on 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 by 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 – The 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 of where a particular sales representative stands regarding 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:
- they can be built from the ground up as a completely new forecast or
- 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 users’ historical and current deal closure patterns will also be analyzed 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.
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