Imagine going on a trek in the mountains without any knowledge of the weather conditions or having a guide. That would be too scary, right?
You should be a smart trekker who understands that weather conditions can change at any time, and it’s best to familiarize yourself with the weather patterns for that time of year in that particular area.
In the modern world, being a salesperson is quite similar to being a trekker. The ever-changing market and customer demands require salespeople to make use of past data to make their future decisions.
A study says that over 90% of B2B enterprise sales organizations will keep making decisions based on intuition instead of advanced data analytics by 2025. And the results will be pretty clear- inaccurate sales forecasts, broken sales pipelines, and unachieved targets.
But there’s a chance you can be in the 10% of the sales organizations. For this, you’ll need sales forecasting tools. As the name suggests, these tools can help you predict how much revenue you’ll generate in a given time period.
So, let us take you through our list of the best 10 sales forecasting tools that you need for your business in 2024.
The reason you need a sales forecasting tool is that you want to predict the trends and check how well your past sales initiatives worked. Here are our top picks for 2024 that will help you do exactly this.
1.1. Kylas Sales CRM
Kylas is a sales-focused CRM tool that offers great features for businesses of all sizes. Through its customized sales dashboard, it lets you get a real-time picture of your business’ productivity and sales progression. You can easily customize the dashboard with important metrics and reports as per your growing business requirements.
The CRM tool helps you use your current data to obtain a clear picture of the sales revenue your team can generate within a given time period and make the right business decisions. Based on the insights garnered, you can prioritize your deals and allocate resources for higher conversions. You can also forecast revenue on the basis of the expected closure date of the deal.
Key Features:
- Custom Reports and Sales Dashboards
- Deal and Pipeline Management
- Data-Driven Business Insights
- Sales Performance Tracking
Best for: Marketing, sales, and customer service teams
1.2. Gong
Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that helps businesses engage with their customers, forecast sales accurately, and enhance team productivity. It collects data from various customer touchpoints such as calls and emails to provide in-depth analysis.
Gong helps users gain visibility into their pipelines so that they can track their progress and forecast future results. Along with this, the platform also helps users get an idea of the potential risks such as low engagement from decision-makers, stuck deals, etc. which further helps the user to adjust their moves accordingly.
Key Features:
- Event Triggered Recording
Best for: B2B sales teams
1.3. Spotio
Spotio is a field sales management tool that helps optimize sales processes such as lead capturing, sales pipeline management, tracking, etc. It makes it easy to manage leads with route planning and mapping features for accurate sales forecasting. It also offers real-time location and activity tracking that helps the sales team enhance productivity.
Key Features:
Best for: Field sales team
1.4. Aviso
Aviso is a popular AI sales forecasting tool that guarantees 98% forecast accuracy. It combines human judgment with its advanced forecasting AI features to offer great outcomes. The platform offers several products for remote sales collaboration and revenue-based operations. It helps users make data-based decisions by offering analytics for pipeline and deal management.
Key Features:
- Conversational Intelligence
- Deal & Pipeline Inspection
- Relationship Intelligence
Best for: Revenue teams
1.5. Anaplan
Anaplan is a cloud-based platform that helps sales teams with its forecasting features to make data-driven business decisions. This further helps in optimizing resource allocation and achieving revenue targets precisely.
It offers great tools for operational planning, supply planning, and budgeting for large enterprises. With its predictive analysis, businesses can identify growth opportunities and enhance their productivity. Users get a quick glance at the performance which helps them make faster decisions.
Key Features:
Best for: HR teams
1.6. Avercast
Avercast is a popular revenue forecasting tool that uses a large number of algorithms to offer accurate forecasts. It offers a simple interface and you can check your sales data in the form of graphs and charts. You can create reports using the parameters you want to check. With its demand planning and business intelligence, you can easily determine business opportunities and risks.
Key Features:
Best for: Sales and operations teams
1.7. Workday Adaptive Planning
Workday Adaptive Planning is a sales planning platform that lets users forecast and plan their future moves. The software helps users stay updated with the changing business environment by offering sales planning tools, detailed reports, and accurate sales forecasts. It also lets users track their KPIs, create what-if scenarios, and collaborate with team members.
Key Features:
- Analytics and Forecasting
Best for: Finance and FP&A teams
Mediafly or InsightSquared helps sales leaders manage their teams by offering them insights into every stage of the customer buying process. It is a user-friendly platform that allows users to create specific reports and view data from any time frame to get an idea of the customer buying behavior. The platform helps sales managers make powerful business decisions on the basis of the accurate sales forecasts it offers.
Key Features:
- Customer Relationship Management
Best for: Revenue teams
1.9. Clari
Clari is another sales forecasting tool used by B2B leaders which is known to help them shorten their sales cycles and get accurate sales forecasts. It offers a clear view of what you will earn by the end of every quarter. It also offers account engagement, CRM automation, pipeline inspection, and revenue intelligence.
Key Features:
Best for: Sales and revenue teams
1.10. Creatio
Creatio is a popular sales management tool that helps users get a clear view of their sales cycle. It acts as a centralized platform for storing all customer information and offers various tools to forecast sales. With the platform, you can easily create processes and workflows for your sales team and create custom business apps as per your requirements.
Key Features:
Best for: Small and large teams
2. What is Sales Forecasting?
As the name suggests, sales forecasting can be defined as the process of predicting future sales on the basis of historical data, market trends, and past sales performance. In other words, it can be defined as the estimation of future revenue by predicting the amount of sales a salesperson, sales, team, or the entire company will make in a certain span of time.
3. What are the Benefits of Sales Forecasting?
Sales forecasting offers numerous benefits such as:
- Improving the decision-making process through accurate predictions.
- Getting an idea of the performance of sales reps and sales teams.
- Detecting errors in the sales pipeline and process.
- Aligning sales quotas and revenue goals.
- Reducing time spent on planning business.
- Setting benchmarks to improve sales in the future.
- Helping the sales team focus on high-profit sales opportunities for better conversions.
- Making accurate ROI predictions.
- Determining if the changes you made to your plan worked better than if you didn’t change anything at all.
In a nutshell, sales forecasting helps businesses set realistic and accurate sales goals.
Keep reading if you think that if it’s only about checking the historical data and making future predictions, why can’t you do that manually? Here’s why you need sales forecasting tools for your business.
4.1. Accuracy
Sales forecasting needs skilled labor and not all salespeople nail it. To obtain the most accurate results, salespeople need a deep understanding of sales data, market trends, KPIs, and customer behavior. Sales forecasting tools work great in this manner and help avoid manual errors.
4.2. Save Time
Without a doubt, manual sales forecasting can take up a lot of your sales team’s time. If you can afford to dedicate hours of time every week to collect and analyze sales data to make informed predictions, you can get your sales team to do it manually. Otherwise, a sales forecasting tool is what you need.
After all, for a forecast to be of any use, it must be based on the latest information and how many times your sales team can present the most recent information in front of you. Plus, manual data entry can take up a lot of your sales team’s time that they could have spent on making actual sales.
4.3. Free of Errors
Without a doubt, manual sales forecasting is not as accurate as tool-based sales forecasting. The sales forecasting tools use sophisticated algorithms that offer real-time updates and are not prone to human errors.
5. Conclusion
When you are making a choice for your sales forecasting tool, make sure that choose a tool that is easy to use and lets you make the most of your data. Most times, complex tools bring nothing more than confusion. So, avoid making such choices and go for the one that you can actually use to make sales forecasting work for you.
