Sales forecasting is a surprisingly risky thing, which is ironic since its whole purpose is to identify risk areas in time to apply corrective action. While everyone agrees that an accurate forecast would be a good thing, there are a surprising number of incentives – financial and political – to forecast with too much optimism. Want to know the definition of impossible? A sales forecast that is too conservative.
So how do you spot areas of the forecast that are at risk? There are reports you can run in your CRM that will give you some strong clues:
