Finance Challenge: Revenue Forecasting
What is the greatest challenge to revenue forecasting for the finance director? Is it the reliability of the forecast from sales? Orders that are forecasted to come in get slipped for various reasons. Whatever the reason, an order has the potential to be used in a sales persons forecast several time over a period of time. This of course is a frustration for the finance director who needs to know the exact cost of sale for cash flow purposes.
If you have the ability to have a sales model that critiques, looks and grades the suitability of an opportunity coming in, in the period that it is documented, then the finance director will begin to have a level of confidence in the forecast that he is receiving.
So how does SymVolli help the finance director? Let us look at an example.
SymVolli is a system that takes snapshots of the sales process throughout. In the first snapshot, the revenue forecast of an opportunity is predicted for December 2007, in the second snapshot it has been postponed to January 2008 and in the final snapshot it has been postponed further to February 2008. Automatically, because of the way it is structured this is flagged as slippage by the system. What does this tell you? The person dealing with the opportunity may not be really aware of when the opportunity is coming in. Does he have all the facts of that opportunity and therefore how reliable it is?