Forecasting is an important part of a business's strategy to help set meaningful targets, optimize their sales strategies to help users achieve said target and drive revenue for the business.

With this in mind, Zoho is bringing a number of different enhancements to Zoho CRM's forecasting capabilities to help businesses understand their pipeline better, make accurate forecasts, set realistic targets, and help sales teams achieve them.

Create multiple and condition based forecasts across different periods

Businesses were limited to just a single forecast that encompasses all deals, but now you can create multiple forecasts, which can include all your deals or deals that match specified conditions, with a greater control of the forecast periods.

Forecasts can be created for all the available hierarchy:

• Role/Reporting to

• Territory

Note: If the hierarchy is edited for your forecasts, existing forecasts in old hierarchy will be deleted. New forecasts would have to be created under the updated hierarchy.

Forecasts can be created monthly or quarterly for the following forecast periods.

• Current - 4 Quarters / 12 months of current fiscal year

• Future - 4 Quarters / 12 months of the next fiscal year

• Completed - The previous 2 fiscal years

Forecast types

Two forecasts types can be created which are based around the attribute that is used to set targets for your users:

• Deal Revenue based forecasts - These are forecasts where the targets are based on currency fields like deal amount, expected revenue or other custom currency fields defined the deals module
• Deal Quantity based forecasts - These are forecasts where the targets are based on system defined fields like "count of deals" and other custom number fields

Introducing Best Case and Committed deals under "Forecast Category"

In the current forecasting, deals only had 3 forecast categories that were associated with them.

• Closed won - Deal was marked "Won"

• Closed lost - Deal was marked "omitted"

• Open - Deal was marked "Pipeline"

Now open deals can be tagged with new options under the forecast category:

• Best case - Open deals that have a high chance of being won

• Committed - Open deals that sales reps commit to winning

Instead of generalizing all open deals as pipeline deals, this split gives a better picture as to where a particular sales rep stands in terms of the deals in their pipeline. This allows the administrator to make a more informed decision when setting targets for a particular user.

Sales reps also have the option to update the forecast category in a specific deal manually, to the appropriate option when the situation calls for it. The deal amount will then be updated in your forecast during its next sync.

Transparent split of deals in your pipeline for optimal targets

When setting targets for your users, a popup with your pipeline data shows the split of deals to give you a better picture of where each user stands in-terms of sales numbers.

The deals are split into open and closed won deals, with the open deals being further split into best cases, committed and pipeline deals.

Zia offers target suggestions and predicts target achievement

When creating forecasts, there are two choices. They can be built from the ground up as a completely new forecast, or it can be linked and created from an existing forecast.

When creating a continuous forecast, Zia will calculate and suggest targets based on the historical data of your selected forecasts. This will be available in the forecast create page when setting targets.

The historical and current deal closure pattern of users will be analyzed as well to give you the predicted target achievement for the users. Achievement predictions will be available in the target achievement report.

Compare your performance across different forecast periods

All your created forecasts will be available in a list view under the forecast module. You can now drill down into a particular forecast and compare how your business performance fared across the years.

Depending on the duration selected in the filter, the following data will be consolidated and shown at the top :

• Total target

• Achievement

• Gap

Under the consolidated data, the forecast data for each quarter/month for the selected duration will be listed for a bird's eye view analysis. You can then drill down further to analyze the performance of individual users or roles if required.

Empowering forecast managers

Forecast managers can now build their own forecasts and assign targets to their role, their own target, their peers and sub roles & users. Individual teams can have their own distinct forecasts and targets which can be focused on. These forecasts will be visible for the Admin, CEO and the forecast manager of a higher role who can monitor these forecasts and update them when needed.

If a forecast manager's target has been modified by the CEO, admin or a forecast manager from a higher role, the modified target is locked and cannot be changed by the forecast manager.