Do you want to increase the efficiency of your sales team? Use sales forecasting software to generate sales projections and set team targets accordingly.
Not only that, the right software, which I’ll discuss below, will assist you in making data-driven business decisions with an accurate estimate of your sales figures.
Freshsales
Freshsales is a platform where you can get an idea about the potential of deals in your pipeline and project revenue for a given period for assigning sales quotas. Its Sales Forecast dashboard lets you access all the forecast data from a single place.
Key Features:
- Add 5 forecast categories in total with 2 built-in and 3 customizable
- Analyzes the sales cycle of all deals to get profit and loss probabilities
- Use historical data and market trends to generate the forecast
- Identifies top sales reps based on regions, teams, or products
- One-click visual report generation from a customizable dashboard
Zoho CRM
With Zoho CRM, you can build accurate forecasts and get all the necessary information to assign targets for your team. This tool can also let you track the individual performance of each team member and boost their efficiency by identifying bottlenecks.
Key Features:
- Create multiple forecasts consolidating all business deals
- Conditional forecasts for different time zones and locations
- Compare performances of reps and teams
- Greater visibility for setting up targets for the sales teams
- Forecast breakdown for a holistic view of your business
- Custom forecasts around metrics like deal value and purchased license
Anaplan
Anaplan provides reliable and dynamic forecasts that can optimize the process of decision-making across your organization. It also enables you to analyze sales forecasts according to location, product, or account with granular precision.
Key Features:
- Gets sales forecast+st metrics from historical data and third-party sources
- Uses dashboards and KPIs to analyze trends and patterns
- Provides accurate forecasts for all departments and units
- Sync real-time forecasts with different models and metrics
- Uses a single standard methodology for sales projection of the whole company
Gong
Gong offers you complete visibility into pipeline and next-level sales forecasting. Using AI technology, the platform captures every buyer interaction and provides you with deal status based on facts.
Key Features:
- Robust search filters to gather reliable data straight from the customers
- Reality-based view analyzing phone calls, emails, meetings, and contracts
- Automatically diagnose pipeline issues to address the risk factors
- Flexible and customizable deal boards with vital details
- Add real-time info about product, deal, category, and team
Salesmate
Salesmate is an application for revenue estimation and sales performance optimization. Offering you a clear view of the sales pipeline, it helps you avoid possible shortcomings and make informed decisions.
Key Features:
- Salesmate creates forecasts based on reps, teams, periods, and pipeline
- Identifies the best performer of the team and tracks others’ performances
- Develops a strategy to keep the reps motivated to achieve the growth target
- Uses pipeline deals and historical data to get accurate forecast
- Leverages predictive insights to perform statistical analysis
LivePlan
If you are looking for a winning sales forecast for your business projects, go for LivePlan. This platform is ideal for creating forecasts for any business type. Even if your business offers multiple products, it can generate forecasts for all of these and integrate the results into your financial plan.
Key Features:
- Visual forecasting tools to drag and drop and drawing features
- Automatically links sales forecast to Profit & Loss and other financial forecasts
- Integration support for QuickBooks or Xero accounting software
- Easy report sharing with employees and stakeholders
- View actual performance and forecast side by side to create a roadmap
Workday
Workday can utilize sales data to offer you precise sales forecasts for informed decisions and predictable performance of your teams. It provides you with all the necessary data to analyze and create action plans.
Key Features:
- Active dashboard to monitor and visualize sales metrics for strategic decisions
- Sales pipeline visibility for robust sales forecasting without spreadsheets
- Risk assessment through what-if analysis using multiple planning scenarios
- Multiple driver-based models for collaboration across teams and organizations
- Control sales forecast data by connecting it with funnel metrics and pipeline analytics
Revenue Grid
Using Revenue Grid, businesses can facilitate data-driven revenue projections and find out about the chances of the deal closing. It lets you develop a customized sales forecasting process for your sales and RevOps teams for better accuracy and more predictable revenue.
Key Features:
- Generate forecasts for segments like location, product type, etc.
- Creates reports for forecast categories (pipeline, commit, booked revenue)
- Real-time AI-based Signals for crucial forecast changes
- Retrospective analysis for particular reps and sales teams
- Custom Revenue Signals for the reps to meet their sales projections
Pipedrive
Pipedrive helps you visualize the complete picture of your business so that you can develop strategies for future growth and properly manage the cash flow.
Besides revenue projection, the Pipedrive also guides you with the deals you need to prioritize to achieve goals.
Key Features:
- Helps you create sales goals based on historical data
- Offers full insights into past sales performance and activities
- Captures all buyer interactions for trusted revenue forecasting
- Tracks subscription and loyal customers to report cash flow
- Interactive and customizable dashboard for data organization
Aviso
Aviso spares you from the spreadsheet struggle by using its AI technology to provide automatically updated forecasts. It offers 98% forecasting accuracy through deal tracking and progression analysis. Here, you can execute complex forecast models according to your preferred model.
Key Features:
- Gathers historical and current data from omnichannel
- Real-time forecast update across all reports
- Data collection and unification from multiple CRM and data lakes
- Combines traditional revenue forecasting with consumption forecasting
- Visualizes all possible scenarios as your forecasting model
- Integrates with any CRM, including Salesforce
You can book a free demo to walk through the product’s capabilities and get the pricing info.
HubSpot
Get a bird’s-eye view of your sales pipeline and discuss the details easily with your team using HubSpot forecasting software. It allows you to track ongoing sales and identify deals to know if your team is working as per the plan.
HubSpot lets you forecast sales on quarterly or monthly cadences. It offers an easy-to-use interface so that forecast planning will never be a complex task again. In addition, you can conduct 1:1s with service, sales, and customers.
Whether you want to check progress, estimate your quarterly target, look for 1:1 meetings, or more, HubSpot gives everything to your service and sales teams to perform better.
Furthermore, HubSpot allows managers and representatives to submit a customized forecast per month or quarter to enable leaders to visualize everything. Its forecast permissions allow you to control the submissions and know the right source. Thus, you can make better decisions and increase your sales figures.
| ✅ Pros | ❌ Cons |
|---|---|
| A team can submit customized forecasts | Sales forecast is available in higher plan, which can be expensive for small business |
| The forecast permissions functionality is great | |
| Monitor the changes in sales pipeline |
The HubSpot forecasting feature is available in Sales Hub professional plan starting from $450 per month, which includes 5 users.
InsightSquared
Experience the powerful forecasting software with InsightSquared and predict your sales and revenue growth easily. It is a self-service and no-code platform that offers more than 350 cutting-edge reports.
AI sales forecasting by InsightSquared will help you streamline and automate your forecast submissions. It can balance your human input using machine learning and validate your investments and forecasts. This helps you minimizes the risks and meet your goals.
InsightSquared ensures views are updated at the time of meetings to promote effective discussiona. Its smart RevOps dashboard eliminates the gap between informed decisions and data, allowing you to generate revenue faster.
With the forecasting software, your market team will get a uniform view on everything to inspect forecast risks, speed up good decisions, and take effective actions to yield better results. This helps you detect changes, errors, and exceptions instantly by understanding processes, behavior, activities, and results.
Use InsightSquared’s activity capture to easily sync activities and analyze sales processes deeply. In addition, you can record and analyze customers’ calls across sales journeys to capture keywords, talk time, trends, transcripts, and more. Enrich each element like product roadmaps, competitive positioning, marketing campaigns, reporting, forecasts, etc., by combining data with activity capture.
| ✅ Pros | ❌ Cons |
|---|---|
| Recording feature is a plus | Configuration is little tricky |
| Detailed analytics | No flexible pricing |
| Setup is easy |
InsightSquared pricing depends on what you use, and you need to contact their sales team for a customized plan.
What is Sales Forecasting software?
Sales forecasting software is a tool for predicting and projecting the future sales of a company. It can predict the lead volume, pipeline value, and closing probability of deals. Businesses use this application to accurately set realistic sales goals and make strategic decisions.
The use of sales forecasting software is seen for:
- Planning demand for future sales volume
- Understanding the latest market trends
- Analyzing individual and team performance
- Allocating resources and budget
- Setting realistic financial goals
- Making informed business decisions
- Getting business forecasts for all teams
- Sales and operations planning
- Launching new products and expanding the market
How Sales Forecasting Software Works
The function of a sales forecasting application revolves around using historical sales data and analyzing it with different statistical techniques for future sales projections. The steps of its working process include:
- Collecting data from various sources, like CRM, ERP systems, point-of-sale systems, and e-commerce platforms. The collected data includes historical sales data, product details, customer information, and other vital variables
- Eliminating duplicates and inconsistent data for clean data essential for forecasting
- Applying techniques to analyze sales patterns, trends, and correlations with other variables according to the forecasting models and algorithms
- Generating sales forecasts and pipeline deal status for projecting future sales figures
- Analyzing scenarios and performing what-if simulations with changed variables
- Providing visual reports with charts, graphs, and dashboards to communicate sales performance
- Constantly monitoring and automatically updating forecasts in real-time
Conclusion
Sales forecasting software utilizes sales data, statistical algorithms, and the latest analytical techniques to reveal patterns and trends in sales and make near-accurate projections. As a result, businesses can create their sales strategies and efficiently allocate resources.