What is sales forecasting?

Sales forecasting helps leaders estimate sales revenue by predicting the amount of a product or service a sales team will sell. Whether you’re in financial services or the construction industry, accurate forecasts help promote confidence in your operations and establish market credibility. Forecasting also enables sales leaders to scale hiring and investment alongside growth.

What is sales forecasting software?

Sales forecasting software uses your previous sales, deals and other historical data to predict your business’s future sales performance .

What is a CRM forecast?

A CRM forecast is another way of saying “sales forecast”. It uses sales data from your CRM to make accurate predictions about future sales, growth, income and more.

What are the best forecasting tools for business?

The best sales forecasting software allows sales teams to view their sales analytics in real time and accurately predicts sales, growth and revenue. With Pipedrive’s sales forecasting software, you can easily visualize your sales progress with reports and insights . You can also see how many deals are in your sales pipeline and view your key sales forecasts in one of our dashboards . Try our sales forecasting software for free to see how you can benefit.

How to do a sales forecast for a startup business?

Our one disclaimer for startups without past sales is that sales forecasts are tricky – but they’re not impossible. Start by gathering market research and industry data to understand potential market size and demand. Use a sales CRM like Pipedrive to record all this information and prepare it for forecasting. Then, use your CRM system to estimate short-term sales and predict growth. A good CRM can consider factors like your current price, target market, competition, marketing strategies and anticipated earnings to build an accurate forecast.

Sales forecasting software

Forecast revenue to strengthen your sales pipeline

Without a clear picture of business costs and revenue, managing cash flow and planning appropriately for growth can be hard.

Forecasting helps guide your sales by revealing which activities and deals you need to focus on to meet targets.

Pipedrive’s sales forecasting software lets you project future revenue quickly and easily to achieve your goals and grow your company.

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Pipedrive’s sales forecasting software features and add-ons

Optimize your sales strategy with Pipedrive’s powerful CRM forecast features and automations. Use the following features to produce accurate sales forecasts with real-time reports and complete sales pipeline visibility.

Fuel your decision-making with metrics

Use our sales forecast software to adjust your strategy and brief your sales teams with new objectives. Pipedrive’s CRM software collects important metrics, allowing you to make adjustments to ensure you hit sales targets.

Change offers based on past performance

Measure historical sales performance and past sales activities to make changes where necessary. Tweak pricing, promotional offers and new product landing pages using accurate performance history.

Reduce customer churn

Keep tabs on your sales funnel and activities to track churn rates. Leverage historical data to make informed decisions that help reps nurture repeat customers.

Capture up-to-date views of every deal

Fuel your sales forecasting process with hard data from sales planning software. Pipedrive’s sales forecasting tools provide visibility into every buyer interaction so you can make trusted and valuable revenue forecasts.

Predict cash flow with recurring revenue

Keep track of all your subscriptions and repeat customers. Foresee deal, team and client revenue to report cash flow with confidence.

Keep data organized with custom dashboards

Say goodbye to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Put together interactive dashboards to clearly visualize your most important KPIs with professional charts and graphs.

The benefits of sales forecasting software

The best sales forecasting solutions help managers keep tabs on their sales teams and uncover opportunities to optimize their sales process. Here are four ways you can benefit from revenue forecasting software:

Nurture your reps. Get insight into reps’ performance so sales managers know when to offer feedback.
Gain boardroom buy-in. Generate forecast reports to reassure decision-makers and bolster your business plans.
Predict future revenue. Use previous sales performance data to accurately predict future sales.
Minimize risk. Identify weak points, strengthen forecast accuracy and make better business decisions with a high-level view of your sales data.

Optimize your sales planning

Maintaining accurate data to enrich your sales planning is hard when you don’t have the correct tools.

The right sales CRM allows you to migrate data from your old platform so you can keep optimizing your sales planning and make smart decisions.

Our state-of-the-art system extracts vital information to give you clearer, more insightful data overviews. Organize ongoing deals by likely close date and compare them to closed deals to adapt your course accordingly.

Switch to our CRM system.

Support your entire sales team

Salespeople need easy access to sales data to make informed decisions.

With sales forecasting software, teams can retrieve valuable information from one central location.

Our CRM system lets sales managers and team members tailor their dashboards to their workflow. Monitor deal progress with pipeline view, see your data at a glance with list view or switch to forecasting view to easily predict revenue.

Try our sales CRM dashboard.

Customize your sales process to suit your needs

Not every sales system has the right features to support your sales process.

A customizable platform allows you to streamline workflows and create processes that work for your business, making it easier to forecast your future revenue.

Pipedrive lets you fully customize the forecasting view and filter for products, date started and much more. See your closed deals arranged by delivery or implementation date.

Use our customizable CRM.

Monitor every deal in your pipeline

The more deals you have in your sales pipeline, the harder it can be to keep track of their most important metrics.

Sales forecast tools allow managers to grab specific sales data and metrics across their entire pipeline.

Use Pipedrive’s CRM to check average sales cycle length, monitor revenue fluctuations and identify gaps in your deal stages.

Try our sales pipeline management software.

See how your reps are performing

If your sales reps are underperforming, you risk losing revenue.

Sales forecasting software helps you spot sales reps with high win rates and see who needs support.

Use Pipedrive’s reporting features to optimize performance and maintain your sales pipeline health.

Explore our sales reporting software.

Strengthen your company’s stock price

Boosting your share price starts with good cash flow management and increasing profits. But managing your finances is hard without a clear picture of business costs and revenue.

A sales forecasting solution helps you see which activities and deals to focus on to meet financial targets.

Use Pipedrive’s CRM to set revenue goals and track which sales actions improve your stock market value.

Try our activities and goals manager.

Over 500+ integrations

Expand the capabilities of Pipedrive with hundreds of apps and integrations

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LeadBooster add-on

Get more leads with this powerful and easy-to-use lead generation toolset. In addition to Chatbot and Live Chat you can engage inbound leads with your Web Forms, or find outbound leads with Prospector. LeadBooster can be added to any Pipedrive CRM plan. This add-on includes:

Chatbot

Live Chat

Prospector

Web Forms

Chatbot

Live Chat

Prospector

Web Forms

Starting from

$32.50

per company per month, billed annually
or $39 per company per month, billed monthly

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How Kovai.co grew its Document360 sales team by 50% with Pipedrive

Document360’s builders Kovai.co needed a tool to help with accurate sales forecasting.

With an ever-growing pipeline, Kovai.co turned to Pipedrive for a professional and intuitive solution. Thanks to Pipedrive’s clarity and functionality, Document360 grew its sales team by 50% and started gaining new customers every month.

“All industries need to know if their sales pipelines are healthy, and all salespeople have to build a structure to help them reach their targets. Pipedrive is ideal for that.”

Read the case study

FAQ

The best sales forecasting software allows sales teams to view their sales analytics in real time and accurately predicts sales, growth and revenue.

With Pipedrive’s sales forecasting software, you can easily visualize your sales progress with reports and insights. You can also see how many deals are in your sales pipeline and view your key sales forecasts in one of our dashboards.

Try our sales forecasting software for free to see how you can benefit.
Our one disclaimer for startups without past sales is that sales forecasts are tricky – but they’re not impossible.

Start by gathering market research and industry data to understand potential market size and demand. Use a sales CRM like Pipedrive to record all this information and prepare it for forecasting.

Then, use your CRM system to estimate short-term sales and predict growth. A good CRM can consider factors like your current price, target market, competition, marketing strategies and anticipated earnings to build an accurate forecast.

Used by over 100,000 companies in 179 countries

In the forecast view, we look at what deals are due to close this month, next month just to make sure everyone is really honest about what they should be working on.

Carolyn PearsonFounder, Maiden Voyage

One of the favorite features within Pipedrive is the email integration. It pulls all of the clients details in, so that we don’t have to think about it.

Erin and DrewFounders, Pro Arts

As a business owner, my favorite feature in Pipedrive is the statistics and being able to look at the dashboard and use those metrics to help each individual on the team.

Lisa CoyleCEO, 360 Payments