Sales Forecasting & Planning

In today's volatile environment, companies must rely upon both statistical projections of historical demand patterns and market intelligence like future facing sales opportunities to create accurate sales forecasts. However, incorporation of sales opportunities into forecasts has been an imprecise and manual exercise due to varying levels of forecast details, different units of measure, bias of individual sales people in reporting probability of closing their deals, and different CRM systems. In addition, sales executives must be able to analyze changes to sales funnels over days, weeks, and months to monitor it closely in order to ensure accurate forecasts. Typical SFA/CRM systems do not provide such analysis.

The Steelwedge Sales Forecasting and Planning solution bridges the gap between sales pipeline opportunities/analysis and demand planning processes. The solution translates sales opportunities into meaningful product demand information and incorporates this market intelligence into the consensus demand forecasting and planning process. In addition, it allows the sales management to forecast better by providing a detailed historical waterfall analysis of the sales funnel.

Capabilities:

• Links SFA/CRM sales forecast with the consensus demand forecasting and planning process
• Analyzes sales forecast probability, bias and trends
• Filters and evaluates sales lead data for forecast inclusion or exclusion
• Links sales opportunities to product configurations for configure-to-order sales opportunities
• Enables the user to flexibly view and override sales opportunity data
• Sales funnel change analysis (waterfall analysis) with data drill-downs to perform root cause analysis
• Configurable executive dashboards with actual to plan progress metrics reporting
• Real time exceptions and alerts to Sales Pipeline changes, over pre-defined thresholds
• Sales forecast creation based upon current opportunities and historical trends
• Scorecards to measure sales team performance and commitments
• Out of the box integration to leading SFA/CRM systems

Benefits:

Steelwedge customers have realized the following benefits from deploying the Sales Forecasting and Planning solution:

• Improved forecast accuracy by incorporating
  sales market intelligence into the forecasting process
• Increased sales order fill rates
• Increased on-time deliveries
• Improved sales accountability to forecasts