Navigating your Sales Forecast

With the compounding disruptions in buying dynamics in 2023, how you manage your sales team and the forecasting will determine how productive and resilient your sales team needs to be during the economic environment pressures and a challenges.

Leverage a checklist to help you organize your thinking around the core elements to fully support your sales team, Founder and leadership team and clients. Remember to inspire what you expect by directly engaging in new client meetings, making those tough renewal client calls, and picking up the phone and prospecting with your team.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive set of steps, but rather a starting reference point. Please email additional suggestions and learnings to me at [email protected] as I will be updating this article quarterly to include your inputs.

• Establish and Communicate the Top Priorities
  • Everyone has great intentions, but you need to communicate and define what good looks like right now so everyone has a clear sense of individual and team-based expectations
  • Establish the most important sales activity KPIs (leading indicators) required to drive new growth, client expansion and retention results in the next 30-60-90 days?
  • Leverage your Founder and Senior Leaders to repeat, reinforce, and replay the top priorities beyond the sales team

• Leverage your Demand and Sales data to identify the specific areas within your sales cycle that are most impacted  
  • Where in the sales process are clients no longer responding?
    • Identify/Discovery, Capability/Demo, Develop/Propose, or Commit/Close phase  
  • Double down on call preparation and role playing with your reps to increase their confidence

• Pipeline Hygiene: Review all the Top Growth Deals untouched for the past 30 days and 30 days past your Average Sales Lifecycle period
  • Prepare sanity check questions on Top Growth Deals to prioritize next critical meeting objectives  
  • Foster situational leadership: identify problems-analyze & outline potential solutions-empower your reps
  • Bring gratitude, care, and trust for your team’s ability to advance opportunities with your oversight!

• Keep protecting the base: Client and Wallet Retention is the bedrock of success  
  • Proactively reach out to all clients renewing in the next 120 days
  • Offer renewal incentives that deepen trust and value to solve client’s real problems
    • Add licenses/users, upgrade service level, x months paid for y months term
  • Show gratitude by being flexible to client pressure points and their cost/risk factors

• Build your scenario-based forecast range for Worst Case, Expected Case, Best Case
  • Remember your Demand and Sales actual data over the past 6 months is potentially an early indicator of projected pipeline velocity/phase in 1H, 2023

These are some steps to help you start building out your sales forecast cadence. Now, more than ever before, trust and close relationships with our teams and clients surpass position-title.