Can you guess how much money you’ll make in the next three months?
It would be time to implement sales forecasting tools if you had to guess. Every company aspires to outsmart its rivals in today’s data-driven global marketplace. Plus, a data-backed company plan must include accurate sales forecasting.
Why? You’ll be better able to make decisions and boost overall sales efficiency with an accurate forecast of your future sales using a sales forecasting tool. Forecasting is better than guessing and can help you beat your competitors.
Applying established sales strategies to current data quickly, easily, and cost-effectively maximizes this advantage. For this reason, it’s essential to take advantage of top-tier forecasting software rather than wasting time with laborious, time-consuming manual analysis.
This blog introduces the core principle and finest sales forecasting process. We will also discuss the best 7 real-time sales revenue forecasting software. Let’s begin!
What is Sales Forecasting?
Sales forecasting calculates the number of items or services a salesperson, sales team, or firm is expected to sell in a certain period, such as weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually, to anticipate future revenue.
The main advantages of sales forecasting are as follows:
- Helps you make better judgments by providing more accurate predictions.
- Helps assess salespeople’s or teams’ progress.
- Finds mistakes in your sales pipelines and processes more quickly.
- Brings sales targets in line with revenue projections.
- Provides accurate information to speed up planning territorial coverage and quota.
- Creates metrics for evaluating and increasing sales in the future.
- Conversion rates will increase since your sales force will be better able to zero in on the most lucrative offers in the sales funnel.
- Future ROI forecasts may be made with more precision.
- Allows you to evaluate the impact of potential changes to a strategy against the predicted impact of keeping things the same.
The following are the top sales forecasting tools to consider:
1. Pipedrive
Pipedrive’s customer relationship management (CRM) and pipeline management features are indispensable for sales teams of any size. It streamlines sales processes by automating many record-keeping, analytical, and sales forecasting tools. In addition, it has a user-friendly design that increases productivity and usability.
SMEs and corporate teams are the ideal users of this program. Pipedrive’s tiered pricing structure means it can work with any budget or requirement:
- Essential plan: $14.9 per month
- Advanced plan: $24.9 per month
- Professional plan: $49.9 per month
- Enterprise plan: $99 per month
2. RevenueGrid
Revenue Grid is ranked #290 in popularity among all CRM Tools. Companies of any size may benefit from using Revenue Grid. Revenue Grid supports several platforms, including Windows. In addition, it may be used in both cloud and on-premise configurations.
Revenue Grid is a sales interaction software and forecasting tool that automates your nurturing efforts to get you more meetings and responses. Using email, phone, text, and social media to interact with leads, you can set up automatic sequences that seem to be written just for each lead.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is a CRM platform that combines marketing, sales, and customer service into one system. It’s a managing sales and forecasting tool to make your customer experience better. HubSpot has free sales forecasting tools that you can test.
This platform works well for marketing, sales, and customer service teams. HubSpot has different pricing plans for the full CRM suite.
Starter plan: $50 per month for 1 user
Professional plan: $1780 per month for 5 users
Enterprise plan: $5000 per month for 10 users
4. SPOTIO
SPOTIO is a field sales engagement platform that helps you capture leads, monitor your team’s availability, organize your sales funnel, and anticipate future income much more quickly and easily. Your sales staff will find this program useful across the board since it aids in forecasting, planning, and implementing strategies.
Ideal for: On-site sales teams
Pricing: It offers flexible plans for teams, businesses, professionals, and corporations.
5. Anaplan
Anaplan is a versatile integrated sales planning and forecasting software that helps businesses maintain control over their performance. It offers budgeting, operational planning, supply planning, and sales incentives solutions.
Anaplan emphasizes collaboration among cross-functional teams to support growth. Although lacking the communication and graphics features of a CRM, Anaplan provides powerful planning capabilities that can present challenges for newer companies without a graphics team.
Ideal for: Large-scale businesses
Pricing: It offers flexible plans for Basic, pro, and premium versions.
6. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is an all-inclusive platform for managing sales and interacting with customers. As a central hub, it coordinates your business’s marketing, sales, and customer service efforts. With this archive, you may use many built-in tools for scheduling, documenting, forecasting, and customer service.
Ideal for: Small enterprises and startups
Pricing: $50 per month for 1 user
7. InsightSquared
InsightSquared believes that sales forecasting should be hassle-free and straightforward. This aligns with our belief, so it is among the top sales forecasting tools. Investing in this service gives you access to cutting-edge AI to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of your forecasts.
InsightSquared offers targeting regional or product-level predictions. Monthly or quarterly reviews of these projections are possible. The program keeps track of every alteration, so users may learn from past failures to meet sales quotas.
What’s even better? This robust sales capability is simple to use and does not call for any coding knowledge. Sales forecasting software provides sales managers with over 350 pre-built reports.
Ideal for: Sales executives
Pricing: It offers flexible, role-based pricing.
Why are Sales Forecasting Tools Important?
As a company owner, your financial strategy highly depends on future sales predictions. Key financial reports, including balance sheets, cash flow, and income statements may be readily derived from accurate sales projections.
As a matter of fact, 97% of firms utilizing forecasting tools meet their mandates, whereas just 55% of organizations without forecasting systems do so.
You need to know how long you want to look at and avoid blanket statements about sales for the whole company or each product to make an accurate sales estimate. Instead, you should focus on finding from three to ten different sales groups that fit your business plan. This method makes the planning process easier and more accurate.
Remember that predicting sales is not an exact science, and changes can be made when needed. So start with a few sales areas and change how you do things as you go.
