The sales pipeline encompasses all the ongoing opportunities that your sales team is actively pursuing, regardless of their current position within the sales cycle. Maintaining a robust pipeline of opportunities is essential for sustaining your business into the future. Within the pipeline, forecasts represent a specific subset of opportunities. These forecasts concentrate on opportunities expected to conclude within a defined timeframe, which may span a month, quarter, year, or a custom period of your choosing. This article explains How to use Forecasting tool for mortgage firms in Salesforce.
Why Sales Forecasting is important?
- In the management of a sales pipeline, each stage corresponds to a distinct forecast category.
- These categories serve as indicators of the likelihood that a deal will successfully close once it reaches a specific stage.
- This not only reduces uncertainty but also enhances responsiveness and service quality.
- Sales forecasts play a crucial role in enabling business owners to plan for essential requirements such as raw materials, workforce, budget allocation, and other logistical needs.
- They serve as a roadmap for proactive preparation, allowing you to identify and address potential issues before they manifest, ultimately aiding in their prevention.
- Sales forecasts provide insights into past sales performance, offering valuable guidance on the potential outcomes of specific actions based on historical trends.
- Establish targets that all departments can use as a foundation for their action plans to support the sales team and enhance overall results.
- This foster improved communication between departments and paves the way for continuous enhancements in the organization’s operations.
How to set up Salesforce forecasting
- Enable Forecasts
- Navigate to Setup
- Activate ‘Enable Forecasts’
2. User Permissions
- Turn on Allow Forecasting permission for all users who need access to forecasting. By enabling individual users, you retain granular control over access even if multiple groups use the same profile.
3. Forecast Hierarchy
- Forecasts hierarchy determines how forecasts roll up within the organization and sets viewing and adjustment permissions.
- Role-based forecasts hierarchy is auto-generated based on the role hierarchy but may require manual additions or edits for managers, sales reps, and other users. You can do this from ‘Forecasts Hierarchy’ in Setup.
- Each forecast user must be part of the forecast hierarchy.
4. Forecast categories
- Opportunity stages are linked to forecast categories, reflecting the likelihood of a successful closure.
- The default mapping for these categories is pre-defined in the Opportunity object’s Stage field.
- Pipeline (sales prospects anticipated to conclude in the future).
- Best Case (sales prospects with the highest potential value expected to close).
- Commit (sales prospects projected to close within a defined timeframe).
- Closed (sales prospects that have already been successfully concluded and won).
- Customization allows you to adapt these mappings to align with your business needs.
- In our example, the standard Opportunity object is renamed as ‘Loan’ to contain the Borrower Loan information and the standard Stage picklist field is modified to include the various stages of the loan pipeline.
- For instance, a loan in the ‘Docs Received’ stage has a higher closing probability and can be categorized as “Commit” in your forecast.
- Opportunities/Loans in the early stages belong to the open pipeline category.
5. Forecast Types
- Your sales forecast requirements depend on your business model, products and services, and sales-driven departments.
- In Salesforce, these perspectives are transformed into forecast models, known as “forecast types.”
We only covered the initial steps of How to use Forecasting tool for mortgage firms in Salesforce. We will learn more about forecasting in an upcoming article.
To know more click What is sales forecasting and how to use it – Salesforce IN
Take Five Consulting is a technology company, based in Virginia U.S., that specializes in the Mortgage Banking vertical especially LOS implementation and application development. Take Five Consulting creates and implement mortgage technology and software specifically for Mortgage Industry.
