As brands struggle to achieve their sales target, it is essential that they forgo their usual approach of traditional forecasting and instead adopt today’s AI-Driven Sales Forecasting.
AI-driven sales can address many issues for companies that are finding it difficult to deal with the COVID-19 uncertainties. Making their way into Q4, brands are not getting the desired results due to the pandemic, increasing the urgency for the brands to pivot the way they operate.
This has also made it the need of the hour to enhance reporting accuracy and boost agility in decision-making.
This urgency is felt more in the sales department of a brand, where the sales reps are responsible for boosting the revenue and, in turn, sustaining the business operations.
However, the pandemic has made it difficult for sales organizations to meet the demands presented by the global economic crisis. Using traditional forecasting strategies, doesn’t provide the necessary insights of the business’s growth path.
As brands are forced to find ways in this continuous uncertainty, sales leaders must be provided the required tools that help them with the unpredictability and inadequacies present in today’s forecasting process. This will help them to develop ways to chart the sales performance across the sales lifecycle.
Sales leaders can catch up with the increasing demands by integrating AI-driven forecasting tools in their approach. This will help them to make faster, better-informed decisions in today’s constantly changing business scenario.
Obstacle in the Way
Sales forecasts have a habit of pivoting from the required goals. A study conducted by Gartner states that 55 percent of sales leaders are not sure in the accuracies of the forecasting prediction.
A few key problems faced by brands are:
- Having inconsistent sales process execution across teams, as every individual has their own methodologies and approaches to close a deal.
- Poor Data quality due to rarely updating CRM systems and spreadsheets increases the load on department managers to get the information from their sales representatives.
These challenges create a leak in the sales pipeline, thus making it difficult to accurately forecast.
The same issue holds under normal circumstances as well. But, inaccuracies in forecasting in today’s uncertain economic landscape can have an adverse effect on the business planning operation. It’s a dangerous situation, since failure to achieve the sales target can put the brand out of business.
However, if the targets are achieved even in such tough times, it can put the brand on the map and open the door for many opportunities.
Adopting AI-driven Sales to solve the problem
With AI, brands can close the dreaded discrepancies that exist between forecasting and actual results. By implementing AI-driven forecasting tools, sales leaders do not have to rely on guesswork. They are empowered to provide accurate, real-time insights about how the sales department is performing and, at the same time, can bridge the gaps with required actions that impact the revenue.
Advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that are deeply integrated in data can help to automate and organize the sales forecasting process.
Brands should seek out tools that will help them to:
- Provide sales leaders with the health score for of all their teams, across the entire sales lifecycle
- Assess the probability of each deal with real-time data insights.
- Empower finance departments to develop models for different scenarios for sales commission payouts before the payment.
This approach strengthens the confidence among leaders to drive better visibility and alignment across the business.
Surviving in today’s B2B sales landscape is difficult. However, with AI-driven forecasting tools, C-suites can gain visibility into sales activity, restore confidence in their targets and make informed business decisions.
