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You’re struggling to forecast sales. How can you use sales automation tools to improve your accuracy?

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Forecasting sales is one of the most challenging and important tasks for direct sales professionals. It helps you plan your activities, allocate your resources, and measure your performance. But how can you forecast sales accurately when you have to deal with multiple variables, such as customer behavior, market conditions, and competition? The answer is to use sales automation tools that can help you collect, analyze, and act on data more efficiently and effectively. In this article, we will show you how to use sales automation tools to improve your sales forecasting accuracy in four steps.

本文章的要点总结

Integrate CRM tools:

Implement customer relationship management (CRM) systems to centralize data and get real-time insights. They help you understand customer interactions and predict sales trends with greater accuracy.
Adopt sales analytics:

Utilize advanced analytics platforms for a deep dive into your sales data. They turn raw numbers into actionable insights, enabling you to refine your forecasting methods based on solid evidence.

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1 Define your sales process

The first step to improve your sales forecasting accuracy is to define your sales process clearly and consistently. Your sales process is the sequence of stages that your prospects go through from the initial contact to the final purchase. By defining your sales process, you can identify the key activities, milestones, and indicators that move your prospects along the funnel. You can also assign probabilities and values to each stage, based on historical data and industry benchmarks. This will help you estimate how likely and how much each prospect will buy from you.

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Achilleas Voutsinas

AI, Sales, Technology, Cyber Security, Cloud | xFounder
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Make sure that you have a clear playbook for your sales process. Leads need to be convinced to adapt to this process and not the other way around! This way, you can shorten sales cycles and close more business!

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Awodoyin Ifeoluwa

Direct Sales Expert | Social Media Manager | Transformational Author 'Before You Turn 20' | Content Writer | ??Beauty + Fashion Entrepreneur??SDG4 Advocate
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Making use of the popular sales funnel would help you keep records of the stages from the awareness stage to the final purchase. This will also help you know the prospect you should channel your energy on and those you should keep in the follow up level.

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2 Track your sales activities

The second step to improve your sales forecasting accuracy is to track your sales activities diligently and systematically. Your sales activities are the actions that you take to engage, nurture, and close your prospects, such as calls, emails, meetings, demos, and proposals. By tracking your sales activities, you can measure how well you are executing your sales process, how engaged your prospects are, and how close they are to making a decision. You can also spot any gaps, bottlenecks, or delays that might affect your sales performance.

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Nicholai Allen

Honored to be Saving Lives and Property with Innovative Technology.
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Definitely engage a CRM system if you can such as sugar, zoho, sales force, etc. There are some basic cheap ones that do great like zoho. You can integrate emails and leads so you make sure no one is falling through the cracks. You can also re-approach past leads with new products or advancements to tip the scales.

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Fady Megally

Sr. Strategic Account Manager | D&I lead
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Make sure to always have easy access to up-to-date data. Utilizing a CRM tool can be invaluable for ensuring that your team has access to customer information. Keeping this data current not only improves forecast accuracy but also demonstrates your commitment to customer care.

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3 Use a sales automation tool

The third step to improve your sales forecasting accuracy is to use a sales automation tool that can automate and streamline your sales process and activities. A sales automation tool is a software application that can help you manage your leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, tasks, and deals more efficiently and effectively. It can also help you capture, store, and analyze data from various sources, such as your CRM, email, phone, web, and social media. By using a sales automation tool, you can save time, reduce errors, and increase productivity.

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Nemanja Basaric

Head of Sales
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One of the most helpful things you can do is track previous trends regarding sales. Technical analysis is always useful as an indicator, but we can't be blinded by previous sales quotas. There has to be adequate observation of current trends and changes in the market.

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George Hyde

Global Commercial B2B Sales Leader - Focused on international commercial, revenue, sales & marketing team transformations.
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Important here is to involve the entire sales team from support functions to outreach and account management team in setting up the best CRM flow relevant to your individual business and market.

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4 Review and adjust your sales forecast

The fourth step to improve your sales forecasting accuracy is to review and adjust your sales forecast regularly and realistically. Your sales forecast is the projection of how much revenue you expect to generate from your sales opportunities in a given period. By reviewing your sales forecast, you can compare your actual results with your expected results, and identify any discrepancies, trends, or patterns. By adjusting your sales forecast, you can update your assumptions, probabilities, and values based on new information, feedback, or changes in the market.

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Bhadresh Dani

Amazon #1 Best Selling Author l Vice President at Bharat Bijlee Ltd l P & L Management l Drives & Automation l IIOT I Business Transformation I E - Mobility l Key Account Management I CII Start-Up Mentor
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strong and focus weekly sales review will be really helpful for sales manager to adjust sales forecast. but before the review sales plan should be so accurate that will not allow to deviate sales so much.

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Nicholai Allen

Honored to be Saving Lives and Property with Innovative Technology.
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Depending on your products, you can detect sales trends that affect your forecast and may be out of your control, for example seasons or emergencies. Once you have started sales, you can forecast what they were based on time passed and you can simply extend that but if you identify the resources you uses to generate those sales and then increase those, then its safe to say you can commensurately forecast an increase in sales if you increase the resources that got you those sales.

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5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Hassen M.

EMEA & APAC Sales Director, Multiplier
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Make the distinction between: - Expansion revenue forecast - New business revenue forecast You can't forecast accurately without having clean CRM hygiene. The Stage Close date and deal value must be accurate.

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Ahmed Darwish

sales specialist
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Always listen to your customers feedback as they are the ones that can drive your sales up and try to to improve and implement it always keep an open line of communication with them.

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You’re struggling to forecast sales. How can you use sales automation tools to improve your accuracy?

1

2

3

4

5

1 Define your sales process

2 Track your sales activities

3 Use a sales automation tool

4 Review and adjust your sales forecast

5 Here’s what else to consider

Direct Sales

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You’re struggling to forecast sales. How can you use sales automation tools to improve your accuracy?

1

2

3

4

5

1 Define your sales process

2 Track your sales activities

3 Use a sales automation tool

4 Review and adjust your sales forecast

5 Here’s what else to consider

Direct Sales

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