Never get caught blindsided
I have recently decided to not keep my immense knowledge to myself and have started to pen a series of blog articles about the integrations and the software GTconsult uses with its clients and internally.
GTconsult has always been a technology consultancy at heart, which means we spend most of our time trying to figure out how to assist clients business issues and** risks**, and very little time on our own.
One of our main issues was understanding sales forecasting. This is a simple financial report that is critical to any business.
Sales forecasting is the process of estimating future sales. Accurate sales forecasts enable companies to make informed business decisions and predict short-term and long-term performance. Companies can base their forecasts on past sales data, industry-wide comparisons, and economic trends.
Without knowing that we did not have enough business coming down the pipe in 90 days, we where blindsided when future days turned into the present and left us scrambling to drum up business.
Using Excel workbooks with estimations was a tedious and laborious method which required the full commitment of one our senior directors to update on a daily basis. This method also proved to be very inconsistent, and thus almost pointless as a report is only as good as its accuracy.
We use HubSpot for our customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing software which already has a number of graphs to showcase exactly this type of information. However there was more to it, we had targets per service and product spread over regions and account managers.
PowerBI and Hubspot came to the rescue, we setup integration with CData which allowed our PowerBI report to connect directly to HubSpot. We then added our Excel region and targets spreadsheet into the mix and witnessed amazing results.
Now we have a current 30,60, and 90 day sales forecast report updated twice daily to give accurate reporting based of the sales teams CRM deals. This means that there is one central source of information for all clients and updating automatically using PowerBI.
We have shared this information in Teams and our Office 365 SharePoint sales team site so that the entire sales team can leverage the information at any point in time from their mobile device or desktop.
All this time is saved internally and ensures that the sales team can quickly and easily pull their numbers and make plans to fill their forecasts, if needs be, within minutes which leads to more valuable time with our clients and less on admin.