What are some common opportunity forecasting scenarios?

Your sales organization can forecast opportunities by sales territory for each forecasting period and managers can adjust those forecasts as required. The forecasting feature is available in the Classic user experience only. There are two broad forecasting scenarios that require different setup:

• Scenario 1: Forecasting by Opportunity Owner

• Scenario 2: Forecasting When You Use Sales Territories to Assign Opportunities

Scenario 1: Forecasting by Opportunity Owner

Individual salespeople own their opportunities and forecast them. The forecasts are passed up the management hierarchy for adjustment and approval. Your organization doesn't use geography, product, industry, or other territory dimensions to assign salespeople to opportunities. If your sales process meets these criteria, then setup is as simple as selecting Enable Sales Forecasting in Setup Assistant. The application sets up everything you need:

• Sets up a sales territory hierarchy that mirrors your sales resource hierarchy, with the individual salespeople as territory owners.

• Assigns opportunities to the territory of their owners. This means that opportunity revenue is automatically included in the forecasts of the opportunity owner.

  When new accounts or opportunities come in, managers assign ownership to one of their salespeople and the application automatically includes those accounts and opportunities in each owner's territory.

• Keeps the sales territories in sync if your resource hierarchy changes.

  If you do update the sales hierarchy and want to see that the changes reflected in your forecasts right away, then you must run the Refresh Territories from Resources process. The process is set to automatically run before each forecasting window freeze.

• Rolls up forecasts up the sales resource hierarchy.

• Enables quarterly forecasts.

• Creates monthly forecast submission windows, so the sales organization can adjust forecasts and pass them up the management chain. All you have to do is adjust the forecast submission window dates.

• Makes it possible for your sales organization to forecast product totals.

If you enable forecasting by opportunity owner in Setup Assistant, then each resource can only be in one territory (their own) and you can't use sales territories to assign opportunities by geography, product, industry, or any other dimension.

Scenario 2: Forecasting When You Use Sales Territories to Assign Opportunities

You assign opportunities to sales territories by geography, product, industry, and other dimensions. You may have multiple salespeople from different parts of the sales organization involved in the sale. The opportunity owner is not necessarily the sole person forecasting the revenue. If your implementation meets any of these criteria, then you must set up sales territories and enable assignment using the Set Forecasting Options task. You can't use Setup Assistant.