The Power of Long-Range Revenue Forecasting

Although it’s always important to look back in order to understand what worked and what didn’t, it’s even more important to look forward and deliver insight into what is likely to happen and what will work. Many companies rely on their sales forecasts. However, sales forecasts are based on assumptions about what specific accounts will do at specific times. This usually means that the further out you look, the more speculative and inaccurate they become. The shorter the sales cycle, the worse the problem. And the fact that buyers engage with sales increasingly later and later in that process just aggravates the problem further.

However, marketing executives can develop vastly more visibility into future period revenues as they take more responsibility for early revenue cycle stages. They can use statistical tools to forecast how many new leads, new opportunities, and how much end-to-end revenue their machine will yield in future periods. That’s because they know exactly how many prospects are in each revenue cycle stage and how likely those prospects are to move through each stage over time.

Revenue Revolutionaries

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