Forecasting isn’t merely an academic exercise or an effort to get the sales team to make commitments in order to hold them accountable. The fact is that your profitability and in some cases, your relationships with investors and partners depend on an accurate forecast.  Accurate forecasts are so important that you have most likely invested in several forecasting tools in an effort to help your sales organization predict results more effectively. Unfortunately, it seems that no matter what you invest, you still miss the forecast far more often than you hit it – sometimes selling far more than predicted and sometimes far less.  Every time your sales teams miss, you know the results will be painful: Higher costs, lower productivity/efficiency and damaged credibility. 

But why is it that in spite of all this investment in CRM technologies, the sales organization is still so “inept” at predicting their own performance? The truth is that forecasting accurately is difficult, but not impossible. 

Asking sales people to predict what they will sell in a finite period is like asking a hiker how many calories and how long it will take to climb a trail she’s never seen before – tough to predict the result if you don’t know the terrain. 

It isn’t that the sales people don’t want to be accurate. It is that they don’t have clear enough criteria for how and when their buyers are going to make a decision, leaving them to rely on “gut feel” to forecast their sales. Combine that with the fact that despite all the technology you have available to assist them, no one has provided the team with a clear mathematical formula that accurately forecasts sales performance and you have no objective counter balance for the “gut feel” of sales people.  This can be made even more challenging when you consider that many sales people are taught to never submit forecasts that are below target, while others consistently sandbag and forecast less than they know they will produce.

Does this mean it is impossible to obtain an accurate forecast? Definitely not! AXIOM can help your team create forecasts that are consistently accurate. Our mathematical forecasting model provides a “counter balance” to the sales rep-generated forecast. And our AXIOM Selling Sciences Program provides sellers and managers with clear, objective criteria for assessing every opportunity – affording them the clearest picture possible of what will close and when. 

The results are more sales, more accurate forecasts, and improved productivity and efficiency; providing you all the information you need to build credibility with key partners and investors.