Describe sales pipeline and forecasting concepts
To truly understand your business’s health, and to make informed strategic business decisions, you need to be able to accurately forecast sales targets. Sales forecasts estimate how much your organization is expecting to sell within a specific timeframe. Accurate sales forecasting is critical to the success of a business. Not only do they help you identify the potential revenue coming in, but they help companies drive all parts of their business. For example, Contoso Coffee’s CEO's need to foresee demand for every product they sell such as coffee and espresso machines to undertake strategic business transformations. Their COO's need to understand the scope of the business to allocate sales resources efficiently. Contoso’s CFO's need visibility into upcoming cash flows to craft financial plans for business growth as they begin to expand into new markets.
With Dynamics 365 Sales forecasting, organizations are empowered to create and manage bottom-up sales forecast processes directly in Dynamics 365 Sales.
Accurate forecasting helps everyone on the team:
Sellers: Sellers can manage their time and sales pipeline more effectively, by making it easy to identify which deals they should be focusing on need to close to meet quotas.
Sales managers and leaders: Sales leaders can plan sales execution strategies and meet sales forecasts more confidently, with greater flexibility, and a clearer view into bottom-up projections. At the same time they gain a deeper understanding of those opportunities that impact the business.
Sales enablement managers: Managers can benefit from greater flexibility to offer more granular and meaningful guidance that accurately reflects sales execution.