Pipeline Forecasting Best Practices

General Guidelines

• Track important details at the opportunity level.
• Measure everything related to potential deals—activities such as emails, meetings, and outreach—to determine their contributions to revenue.
• Create actionable tasks with next steps and completion dates pertaining to opportunities.
• Map your sales stages to forecast categories. To increase your forecast accuracy, adjust close probability based on historical data.
• When adjusting forecasts, have conversations with your subordinates so that they understand your expectations.
• Because opportunities can change frequently, revisit forecast adjustments weekly to avoid out-of-date adjustments.
• To ensure that everyone can access the forecasts they need, designate each sales manager with subordinates as a forecast manager in your role-based forecast hierarchy. Also assign a territory manager to each territory for which you want rolled-up forecasts.
• Customize your forecast category names so they match your business process and terminology.

Navigating Forecast Information

• Forecast users can jump to the forecasts of users and territories that they have access to view. Begin typing a name in the search (Lightning Experience) or “Jump to” (Salesforce Classic) box, and then select the name. If you’ve enabled territory forecasts, type three or more letters to see results for users and territories.
• To expand a row on the forecasts page, click it.
• Navigation links with the names of forecast managers appear at the top of the page as you drill down through the forecast hierarchy. Click these links to quickly move through the hierarchy.

Viewing Forecast Information

• Keep your window sized to 1,024 pixels or greater.
• To view forecast amounts in the forecast summary grid without decimal places, select Show Rounded Amounts from the Display Settings. Full amounts that include the decimal places are shown in the opportunity list header when you select the forecast cell. Decimal places are also included when you’re viewing adjustment and change details. Showing rounded amounts can help maximize screen space.
• In Lightning Experience, if multiple forecast types are enabled, you can select which forecasts you want to view as tabs using the Edit Tab Selections option from the gear icon. In Salesforce Classic, select the forecast from the upper-right dropdown list on the forecasts page.
• Column width in the forecast grid and the opportunity list is adjustable.
• In Lightning Experience, a timestamp shows the date and time when the forecasts page was refreshed. In-progress data updates aren’t indicated.
• In Lightning Experience, rows that have only zero values, including rows with only zero or no quota, are shown by default. To hide all-zero rows except for rollups of subordinates and child territories, deselect Show Rows with All Zero Values in the Display Options on the forecasts page. In Salesforce Classic, this option is available only for product family forecasts.
• If a coworker has shared forecasts with you, select the coworker’s name from the My Shared Forecasts list to access the shared forecasts.
• Analyze trends and check performance using forecast reports.
• Create dashboards for metrics of all activities related to potential sales.

Collaboration

If you’re a forecast manager, share opportunity and forecast information with your team and bring attention to important details.

• In Salesforce Classic, if Chatter is enabled, hover over a subordinate’s name, and click Chat Now to display Chatter options, such as Follow or Send a message.
• In Lightning Experience, share your forecasts page with any Salesforce user at your company. Your coworker sees the same view that you see. When you share, specify whether the coworker can adjust forecasts or only view them.