Solutions

Sales & Revenue Forecasting

Sales and revenue forecasting is at the heart of any company and there’s been a lot of point solutions developed to support this highly collaborative process.

Most notably is the plethora of CRM applications ranging from simple desktop contact managers to hosted CRM solutions. With all the options available, have you ever wondered why so many companies still rely on spreadsheets for sales and revenue forecasting? To us, this is not surprising. In virtually every company some part of the forecasting process is still driven through spreadsheets. Why? It's because spreadsheets are available to everyone, easy to use, and can be used to quickly model virtually any forecasting scenario.

The Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP) is ideal for managing forecasting processes in any company that needs to collaborate between multiple participants and consolidate everyone's input into a single forecast. The collaborative features of BCP, which leverage existing spreadsheets "as-is" and eliminate email and manual "save-as" versioning, insure that accurate and current forecast data is available at all times to monitor the forecast for the company and to make strategic decisions.

Sales & Revenue Forecasting Challenges

  • Since spreadsheets are inherently not collaborative and enterprise applications leave you tethered to an Internet connection, it’s difficult for all participants in the forecasting process to get timely, complete, and relevant information so they can provide input based on the current situation
  • While most companies use CRM applications for opportunity tracking and sales activity management, they still rely on spreadsheets for iterating through revenue forecasting and determining demand and revenue at the unit level. It’s simply too difficult to make changes to lots of data in a CRM application when you’re trying to drive a consensus around the commit numbers
  • Consolidating input from multiple sales people through different hierarchies is a time-consuming process meaning the forecasting cycle is often limited to once a month
  • Understanding what’s changed since the last time you ran through a forecasting process is difficult with spreadsheets and CRM applications. Yet understanding where you’ve been and the historical relevance of prior forecast changes is essential for delivering a quality forecast

The Boardwalktech Solution: BCP-Driven Sales & Revenue Forecasting

  • Forecast consolidation; participants can continue to manage their individual forecast numbers in Excel on their desktop working in isolation. When they are ready to share their commit numbers, the individual forecasts are automatically merged with the shared master forecast in the BCP server and all other users can see the changes at the cell level simply by refreshing the spreadsheets on their desktop
  • Shipments, backlog numbers, and other "actuals" can be automatically updated into the process giving forecast participants a view into how far they have to go to make their forecast plan * See a complete history of all forecast data and how it’s evolved over time. Easily compare changes between any updates over any period of time
  • Other users can access on-demand a consolidated forecast using a browser or Excel and view the most current data. Of course, this is controlled through access control, so they cannot change any forecast numbers
  • Excel’s powerful business modeling environment means any user can easily perform ad hoc/what-if scenario analysis
  • Management can identify changes in the foreacst and analyze any required adjustments and the associated impact on profitability
  • Changes to your process are centrally managed and automatically distributed to all process participants

Benefits of using BCP for Sales & Revenue Forecasting

  • Eliminating email for collaboration, cut & paste for consolidation, and “save-as” for versioning means the forecasting cycle can be shifted from a once a month, tedious process to an “on-demand” sharing of forecast data as it changes
  • Individual forecasters can continue to use Excel in isolation on their desktop which means adoption is high, training is easy, and time taken away from higher-value work is minimized
  • Understanding what changes have occurred in the foreast over its entire lifetime enables a better analysis and helps to calibrate expectations for future forecast performance
  • Since spreadsheets are the common platform between different operating groups, all stakeholders in the sales and revenue forecasting process can use the same shared set of data, but only update their portion of the data. This means everyone stays aligned on expectations and company performance improves