A Sales Person’s Guide to Forecasting
Sales forecasting is the process of estimating future sales. Accurate forecasts are essential if your business is to make informed decisions and plan accordingly for the short and long-terms. Sales forecasting provides insight into how a company should allocate its production resources, organize its workforce, and manage its cashflow.
NetSuite enables sales personnel to provide your company with accurate and timely sales forecasts.
If you use the Advanced Forecasting and Opportunities feature, use this topic to create accurate forecasts.
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Log in to NetSuite as a Sales Person to view your dashboard.
From here you can configure your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) portlet. This portlet provides a quick and effective way of monitoring your forecast directly from your home screen.
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Point your cursor in the upper right corner of the portlet, and then click Set Up from the menu.
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Click the Add Standard KPIs button.
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Click items in the left column to add to your KPI portlet. Click Done, and then Save.
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The items you selected appear in your KPI portlet.
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As you create new opportunities, assign them a status to reflect how far they are in the negotiation process.
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NetSuite assigns each status a corresponding % probability score to indicate the likelihood of a deal closing. For example, the status In Negotiation is awarded 75%. These values are used to determine the weighted forecast.
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Select the category in the Forecast Type field to ensure your opportunities are shown in the correct forecast scenario.
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Enter a range of possible projected amounts for the opportunity. To maintain forecast accuracy, update the field as negotiations progress.
To provide your manager and executives accurate forecasts, you should regularly review and verify the amounts. The Sales Rep Forecast Editor is a single-screen summary of all your opportunities and sales in your forecast. From here you can make adjustments.
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Go to Forecast >Setup > Edit Sales Rep Forecast > List to open the Forecast page.
Click Edit on the required forecast.
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If you think your forecast differs from that calculated by NetSuite, you can manually override the values. These values are the forecast seen by your manager.
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Select the forecast category for each opportunity: Omitted, Worst Case, Most Likely or Upside.
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Update the expected close date and status from the lists.
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Update the range of forecast values for each opportunity.
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NetSuite comes pre-configured with a wide variety of forecast reports. If, however, you need to present specific types of information, you can customize the reports.
For example, a Wolfe Electronics sales person wants to see weighted pipeline amounts on the Forecast by Status Summary report. This report provides a view of how much of the forecast remains to be closed.
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Click the Customize button to open the Report Builder.
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Use Search Fields to access the required field. Click the Pipeline (Weighted) icon to add the column at the end. You can reorder the columns using the Move Left and Move Right buttons. Click Preview to verify that the required information was added to the report.
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Your customized report will be generated in a new page. Click Return To Customization, and then Save to complete the set-up process.
You are ready to begin managing your forecast with NetSuite.