Sales Forecasting
How to Incorporate the Right Mix of Data and Intuition in your Sales Forecasting
The accuracy of forecasts affects every aspect of a company, from the most minute details to decisions that may shape the future of the organization itself. When you miss badly, there are consequences. If you’re an enterprise player you could end up like IBM, jettisoning nearly $9 billion of value in a matter of hours … Continued
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7 Ways to Accelerate your B2B Sales Cycles
The numbers in a typical B2B sales cycle are daunting. Imagine taking an average of 84 days to convert leads into opportunities. Then, it’s another 18 days to work these out into deals – and with only a 6% success rate. This is according to research done by Implisit (now under Salesforce). Consider another study, … Continued
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How Trump’s Presidency May Affect B2B Sales
The economy has never, and will never be predictable — no matter who claims that it is. It gets tiresome to hear projections of growth when all signs point to stagnation or that there will be another catastrophic recession in just a few years that no one can stop. Now that Trump is President Elect, … Continued
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3 Ways Predictive Analytics Pull In Huge Returns for Sales and Marketing Orgs
Running a business is often compared to gambling. Instinct is the word for business acumen, and chance the most powerful factor that determines success or failure. Whoever first came up with this analogy had business all wrong. The truth is, business can be predicted. The outcome of business can be forecast, much like the weather … Continued
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What is Relationship Intelligence Data?
Whereas business intelligence data focuses on elements that are company-centric, relationship intelligence data (RID)—a subset of customer intelligence—puts importance on the relationship between the company and its customers. Instead of tracking performance metrics such as lead response time or average call handling time, RID includes statistics that are unique only to the customer: number of … Continued
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What is Net Promoter Score?
When measuring customer satisfaction with a service, Boston-based consulting firm Bain and Company identified three major groups of people based on the scores they give to one particular question: are they, the customers, going to recommend the particular service they are using to friends and family? Using a normal scale of 0 to 10 as … Continued
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What is Predictive Analytics?
When data is mined and manipulated to produce meaningful information about possible events and trends in the future, the data is said to have been predictive. The branch of data science that deals with these predictions is called predictive analytics, or the usage of historical data to produce, emulate, or predict hypothetical situations and scenarios. … Continued
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A Sales Forecast for Realists (and Results)
Creating a sales forecast can be a dreary slog through a routine spreadsheet. Or it can be an exciting opportunity to maximize your potential. The decision is yours. But the best sales managers rely on the sales forecast to bolster strategic decisions, determine how to allocate resources, and lead their team to success. According to … Continued
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How to Master Your Sales Forecasting
Sales forecasting can seem ambiguous, especially when your expectations don’t line up with your targets. In Forbes.com, author and business consultant Scott Edinger writes, “To say that forecasting is the bane of existence of most sales managers and leaders is a bit of an understatement. For most representatives, the choice between working on the forecast … Continued
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