Sales & Revenue Forecasting

Boardwalk is ideal for managing sales & revenue forecasting processes in any company that needs to collaborate between multiple participants and consolidate everyone's input into a single forecast. The collaboration and trust features of the Boardwalk Digital Ledger ensure 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

Information Availability

Since manual methods are inherently not collaborative and enterprise applications make you click through endless forms, 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

Long Process Cycles

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

Forecasting Data Level

While most companies use CRM applications for opportunity tracking and sales activity management, they still rely on legacy spreadsheets for iterating through revenue forecasting and determining demand and revenue at the unit level

Change Management

Understanding what’s changed since the last time you ran through a forecasting process is difficult when working manually 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

Boardwalk Digital Ledger powered Sales & Revenue Forecasting

Isolation Sharing

Forecasters can continue to manage their individual forecast numbers 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 Boardwalk Digital Ledger server. All other users can see the changes at the cell level simply by refreshing the Excel their desktop

Integration

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

What-if-Scenarios

Since Boardwalk Digital Ledger data is versioned over time, users can easily perform ad hoc/what-if scenario analysis

Forecast Confidence

Management can identify changes in the forecast and analyze any required adjustments and the associated impact on profitability

Benefits of Boardwalk for Sales & Revenue Forecasting

Reduce Cycle Times 70%
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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

Better Decisions
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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

High Adoption
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Understanding what changes have occurred in the forecast over its entire lifetime with an immutable verification enables a better, trusted analysis and helps to calibrate expectations for future forecast performance

Continuous Alignment
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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

With Boardwalk, all users can work in their user interface of choice – including Excel - and all sales and revenue forecasting changes are shared and consolidated automatically with a complete audit trail

Sales & Revenue Forecasting

Research has shown that the vast majority (97%) of companies that implemented a collaborative forecasting processes achieved their sales quotas - compared to just 55% amongst those that did not