Sales forecasting
Protect the health of your sales pipeline with forecasting
What does the future hold for your sales? Let our forecasting tool be your crystal ball. Forecasting serves as your sales guide by showing you the activities and deals you need to focus on to meet your targets.
Free, easy to set up, no credit card required
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Allows highly effective forecasting
Is useful for salespeople and managers alike
Is customizable to suit your needs
Forecasting allows effective sales planning
Successful and reliable sales forecasting is a key element of any sales strategy. Leave extracting data to our state-of-the-art system and benefit from a clear, insightful overview of everything that counts.
See ongoing deals arranged by their likely close date next to deals you’ve already closed for easy comparison. This way, you can adapt your course accordingly. For example, you can work on deals that are likely to close or find new deals to nurture.
Great for salespeople and managers alike
Sales managers can use the forecasting view as their main one, in case they want to spare themselves the digging into individual pipelines, while salespeople have the detail and clarity that comes with individual views.
Customize to suit your needs
Each business has its unique work style. For example, you may want to see your closed deals arranged by delivery or implementation date. Pipedrive enables you to fully customize the forecasting view and filter for products, date started and much more.
What is sales forecasting?
Sales forecasting helps leaders estimate expected sales revenue by predicting the estimated amount of a product or service a sales team will sell in the next week, month or year.
Sales forecasts are particularly handy for companies looking to promote confidence in their operations and establish market credibility. They also enable sales leaders to scale hiring and investment alongside growth.
Measure performance at every stage of the sales process
The best sales forecasting software helps managers keep tabs on their sales teams and uncover opportunities to optimize their sales pipeline.
Nurture your reps
Sales forecasting software gives leaders insights into how reps are performing. Assign more responsibility or offer specific feedback when needed.
Get boardroom buy-in
Level up your business plans for key decision-makers. Pull future sales data from your forecasting software and reassure stakeholders.
Team up with marketing
Forecasting software allows sales managers to notify marketing about processes that require their attention. Help marketing fill the gaps with insights from sales forecasting.
Get insights on every deal in your pipeline
Forecasting software allows managers to grab specific sales metrics across their entire pipeline. Check average sales cycle length, keep an eye on revenue fluctuations and identify gaps in your deal stages.
See how your reps are performing
Your reps are the core of your sales operations, so you should check in with them regularly and provide support when needed.
Sales forecasting software helps managers sort sales reps with high win rates from those who could use your help. Curate tailored training for reps who are falling behind to maintain your sales pipeline health.
How Kovai.co grew their Document360 sales team by 50%
Document360’s builders Kovai.co needed a tool to help with accurate sales forecasting.
With an ever-growing pipeline, they turned to Pipedrive for a professional and intuitive solution.
“All industries need to know if their sales pipelines are healthy, and all salespeople have to build a structure to help them reach their targets. Pipedrive is ideal for that.”
Read the case study
5 ways sales forecasting helps you close more deals
- 1. Inform pipeline coverage with historical data
You’re much more likely to hit sales targets if you have a generous pipeline buffer. So, if your quarterly sales target is $2 million and you have a quarterly deal worth $6 million in the pipeline, you’d have a comfortable 3x pipeline coverage.
Your sales revenue teams can use this data to establish quarterly targets going forward and build a strong deal pipeline. Learn more about sales forecasting methods and get forecasting model templates.
- 2. Avoid last-minute scrambles with attainment metrics
Attainment allows managers to measure the number of closed deals against the quota assigned to that quarter.
You can use this metric to inform your strategy, such as encouraging reps to close deals first thing next quarter. You can also use it to adjust future sales quotas based on deal slippage from that timeframe.
- 3. Leverage past sales data to predict future revenue
Previous sales performance is a good indicator of what the future may have in store. If you can understand the conversion rates at each funnel stage, you can accurately predict the future sales your team can close.
For example, let’s say you want to close 50 deals this year and you learn that your sales team closes 20% of deals with leads who have gone through a demo, and that 10% of leads agree to sign up for the demo. You can then deduce that you’ll need to generate 2500 leads to close 50 deals to meet your yearly goal.
- 4. Identify potential issues and minimize risk
Sales forecasting software doesn’t just inform better business decisions – it has your back at all times.
Get notified if a lead comes to a halt at a certain deal stage, keep an eye on consumer trends and seasonality and watch your competitors for gaps in the market.
- 5. Impress the boardroom with trusted data
One of the biggest advantages of forecasting is the ability to incorporate new ventures into your strategy. With an accurate revenue prediction, sales managers can present revenue health to decision-makers and request bigger budgets for ambitious projects.
Say goodbye to messy Excel spreadsheets. With Pipedrive, you can put together interactive dashboards to easily communicate your most critical benchmarks to everyone and anyone.
How to use Pipedrive to accurately forecast new deals
Ditch the busywork with Pipedrive’s powerful automations. Produce accurate sales forecasts with real-time reports and complete sales pipeline visibility.
Make informed decisions with historical trends
Adjust your strategy and brief your sales teams with new objectives. Pipedrive’s CRM collects important metrics, allowing you to make adjustments and ensure you hit sales targets.
Change offers based on past performance
Gain full insight into sales performance and make changes where necessary. Tweak pricing, promotional offers and new product landing pages using accurate performance history.
Respond to market trends and competitor activity
Seize the spotlight when demand for your product or service is growing. Scope market trends, anticipate increased competition and spot exciting new opportunities early.
Capture up-to-date views of every deal
Fuel your forecasting process with hard data. Pipedrive’s sales forecasting software provides visibility into every buyer interaction so you can make trusted and valuable revenue forecasts.
Enable forecasting at a company-wide scale
Make projections on a grander scale with an informed forecasting methodology. Drive better decision-making across the board by sharing a clear view of business health.
Identify bumps in the road before they happen
Is your budget unclear? Is one of your deals stuck? New competitor arrived in the market? Know what you’re up against and prepare in advance with Pipedrive’s CRM.