Sales Steps and Forecasting is a great way to track your sales opportunities and is available to all types of users (single or multi-user accounts).
With a little planning, Sales Forecasting will give you great insights into how your sales and marketing efforts are developing to deliver you a return on investment.
Sales Forecast Report
Here is an example of a sales forecast report (available in Reports). This shows the forecast earnings for Charlie Smith (Agent) over the next 6 months.
Create Sales Forecast
To create or update a Sales Forecast for a lead:
- View the lead Profile tab
- Click the icon to edit / create Sales Forecast.
When you create the forecast you will need to specify:
- The anticipated closing date
- The forecast amount to be earned
- The current Sales Step
Sales Steps
Sales Steps are set up as part of CRM Settings.
For a Team of Office account, these settings can be managed by Account Admin and apply to all Users in your account.
Sales Steps define the sequence of sales milestones that indicate how a sales opportunity is progressing towards a close.
For example, a sales process could be simple, and so just a few Sales Steps could be defined:
1) New Lead, 2) Presentation Made 3) Closing Date Agreed 4) Close
Or, a sales process could be defined as a more granular set of activities.
The bottom line is that Sales Steps should be meaningful and reflect YOUR own sales process
You will find that your account has a default set of Sales Steps, You can edit or remove these to suit your needs.
To be effective, you should not change your sales steps once they are set up and you start to use them!