While it most often falls short, forecasting is a very vital CRM component. This is rather interesting, because while other CRM functions are certainly important—for example, a CRM would be useless without tracking opportunities—a company can no longer survive without accurate forecasting.
Why Do We Need It?
As we move forward into the future, the need for forecasting only becomes more apparent. Why? Because competition only becomes more intense. To continually succeed, an enterprise will need the best forecasting system they can possibly obtain. You can no longer afford to be “approximate” with forecasts to miss the mark by 20 or 30 percent. You have to be dead on the money. I know many sales managers would argue with me, but right now would venture to say that most mid-level companies have very inaccurate forecasting systems.
You can only manage sales with certainty, and know you’re on safe ground, when you know where your sales figures are most probably headed. Then when you have your sales meetings and set quotas, you’re able to know how each rep is performing, and can drill down into each opportunity to get details where needed.
Risk Minimization
With accurate forecasting, the chief benefit is that you are minimizing risk factors for the company. And combining Forecasting with our other powerful new feature, Opportunity Fitness, opportunities can be leveraged like never before. You now have an overview of where the company should truly invest its time and resources.
Correct focus is only brought about through precise forecasting. As I’ve said many times, when you lose focus, you lose efficiency. When you lose efficiency, you lose productivity.
In practice: The author pairs Forecasting with Coevera's Opportunity Fitness feature to minimize company risk — together they reveal where an enterprise should truly invest its time and resources, because as the author puts it, losing focus loses efficiency, which loses productivity.
Features of Coevera Forecasting
Different date ranges
With no question, sales forecasting within a certain date range for the entire company should be possible, and with most CRM systems, it is. But with Coevera’s Forecasting, you can actually set different forecasting date ranges for different sales teams or different reps. You can even set forecasting ranges for various different product lines or categories.
Not many forecasting tools possess this kind of precision.
Selection of reps and processes
Coevera Forecasting allows you to select one or more different salespeople for forecasting—but it goes well beyond that. Many companies have different sales processes for different products or types of sales (new or repeat, for example). You can select which sales process or processes you want to include in your forecast for a particular rep or set of reps.
As part of forecasting, specific fields can even be selected.
Quota accuracy
Another crucial function of forecasting is the setting of quotas. Setting inaccurate quotas only results in targets not being met, and the forecasts being missed. Coevera Forecasting does away with such inaccuracy.
For example, a yearly quota of $3 million could be divided evenly between two sales reps. This would, of course, come out to $1.5 million per rep.
Any sales manager will tell you, however, that reps do not all produce the same. Therefore, you can divide the quota by the reps, based on their historical average performance. You then might have one rep quota set at $2,267,074.46, and the other at $732,925.54, to add up to the $3 million quota.
Coevera’s forecasting feature will also divide the per-rep quota into 12 months, based on each rep’s past monthly performance.
What if you want to view the forecast by different performance types, such as by ranking? You can rearrange your display to do so.
Sales management is made far easier through accurate sales person quotas based on historical performance.
List View, Coevera View and Chart View
There are even different ways through which past performance data can be evaluated. You can select particular users, or all users, and instantly create a line chart showing their performance month-by-month, or by any period of time you wish. The chart can be by the sum for the period of time, or running sum which incrementally adds the later period’s total to the last.
Drilling down into a particular sales period only requires clicking on it. You can then view the specific deals adding up to that period. Or, you can create a list view of the deals that add up to this amount, and select any particular columns you want to see.
Coevera is the only system available today that displays a pipeline view of forecasted deals, showing where exactly they fall in the particular pipeline stages. This view can include a single rep, a group, or all.
Filter deals within a chart to only see particular types of sales, deals, or products, or any other qualifier you specify.
Coevera is the only system to provide functionality for instant dynamic visualization through collaborative forecasting.
You Can’t Do It Without Coevera
It’s fortunate that our CRM is as visual as it is, and given to accuracy of data, for accurate forecasting would not be possible without reliable data. This means, of course, that you won’t find this level of forecasting anywhere except with Coevera.
When you put our forecasting feature to work for yourself, you’ll realize that there is nothing like Coevera anywhere. It is quite simply the industry’s most functional, usable, and powerful CRM.
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