How many hours each month do you and your team dedicate to forecasting? Forecasting isn’t merely an academic exercise or an effort to get your people to make commitments in order to hold them accountable. The fact is that the company’s ability to deliver to YOUR customers may well depend on the accuracy of your forecast. Come in too high, and there may not be adequate resources to meet demand. Come in too low, and there may be serious consequences from senior management and investors. In fact, accurate forecasts are so important that your company may have invested in several forecasting tools just to help your sales team predict results more effectively. 

Unfortunately, it seems that no matter how hard you try, you still miss the forecast far more often than you hit it. 

But why is it that in spite of all this investment in CRM technologies and considerable coercion on your part, your sales people still cannot forecast their own performance? 

The truth is: forecasting accurately is difficult, but not impossible. 

Unfortunately, forecasts are typically generated by asking the sales people to predict what they will sell. 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 create their forecast. Combine that with the fact that despite all the technology you have available to assist them, no one has provided your 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 your top performers often sandbag to look good at the end of the month, while people who are struggling are unlikely to predict failure. What do you do? Try to balance your sandbaggers and your optimists to get an accurate number. 

Does this mean it is impossible to deliver 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 while our AXIOM Selling Sciences Program provides you and your team with clear, objective criteria for assessing every opportunity. This affords you the clearest picture possible of what will close and when. The results are more sales, more accurate forecasts and happier customers and executives. So browse our site, check us out, and let us know how we can help your team deliver the goods, and the forecast better than ever.