If you've heard the buzz about Sell Premier's Enhanced Forecasting capabilities, you may be asking, "What exactly does that include?", "How is it different from standard forecasting in Sell Advanced/Enterprise?" or even "Why should I care?"
Our product marketing team sat down with Sugar sales leadership to find out how they use standard and Enhanced Forecasting internally to track key metrics and make business decisions. Use these learnings to help you determine the best use of Sugar's standard forecasting and Enhanced Forecasting capabilities for your organization.
Standard forecasting (available in all versions of Sugar Sell & Enterprise) is all about the big picture. Sales managers can drill down in reports and see exactly what the reps on their teams are working on. It also provides the ability to adjust data views easily by working within the actual dashlets/reports.
All this data helps inform sales managers' daily planning: they can see what demos are happening, what meetings are on the calendar, and which deals are in progress. Overall, users get highly contextual data, including a big-picture view of what's happening with their pipeline.
On a competitive note, this is superior to HubSpot and Salesforce. While both offer reports and dashboards, each click within those systems takes you to another tab. Sugar provides to stay in one browser tab and use Focus Drawers to get a more detailed picture of your overarching metrics and key activities.
Enhanced Forecasting takes forecasting and reporting features up a notch. Sales managers and executives can drill down into data and see performance metrics that help them make key business decisions with time-aware data that gives a full picture of the past, present, and future.
Sales managers can see the full flow of leads and prospects plus key metrics like deal velocity, giving their reps a chance to push deals out or pull deals in based on how long they've been in the pipeline. Managers can also drill into individual sales reps' calendars or performance to see how they measure up and any issues that need to be addressed. Or they can create a full view of their team to see all performance at a glance.
Sales reps, for their part, can see their own dashboards and have their own individualized views to help them track progress, dig into any gaps, and see trends over time.
Standard Forecasting Features (all Sell & Enterprise editions) |
Enhanced Forecasting Features (Sell Premier only) |
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Pipeline Metrics dashlet |
Everything in the left column + |
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Opportunity Forecasting |
Forecast & Pipeline Dashlets, including: |
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Forecast worksheets (individual & team) |
Current Quarter Forecast Changes Since Last Week |
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Forecasts Dashboard |
Forecast: Current vs Prior Quarters |
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Hierarchical Quota Targeting |
Top 20 Upside Opps this Quarter |
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Hierarchical Commitment Roll-Ups |
Pipeline: Current & Next Quarter |
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Pipeline Review & Metrics |
Pipeline Creation Trend |
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Pipeline Funnel dashlet |
Funnel Velocity & Conversion |
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Funnel Velocity & Revenue Conversion |
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Funnel Flow Analysis |
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Average Deal Trend Size |
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Win Rate Trend |
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Sales Cycle Trend |
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Sales Velocity by Stage |
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Idle Opps Trend Monthly |
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Forecast Tracker |
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Top 10 Reps for Idle Opportunities |
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Forecast Accuracy |
As you can see, Enhanced Forecasting in Sell Premier brings a lot of added "time-aware" goodness!
For more information about forecasting and reporting, check out the following Quick Videos or contact your Sugar/partner representative for a demo today.
