An Overview of Dynamics 365 for Sales Forecasting

If you have used Dynamics 365 for Sales, then you might be familiar with Goals. Guess what, Goals just got a new brother called Sales Forecasting.

Sales forecasting helps users in situations where external checks and adjustments need to be accounted for. It’s also a great way for small and midsize organizations to adopt the forecasting process before stepping up to predictive forecasting.
It helps organizations to project how much a sales team can sell or to estimate the revenue of the organization. This information, in turn, provides necessary insights into how to manage their resources or cash flow.

Personas:

• Sales managers want to create a forecast of their team members so they can accurately predict revenue for a given period and make informed business decisions and predict the short-term and long-term performance of their teams.
• Salespeople want to create a forecast for themselves to know whether they will reach their quota, quickly spot pipeline risks, and prevent deals from slipping away by identifying cautionary factors before it’s too late.

Simple forecasting is expected to be available only for Sales Hub, and that means only for Unified Interface.

Prerequisites:

To create a forecast definition, there are few requisites:

• System Administrator, forecast manager, or forecast user role is assigned to you. As usual, we can also create custom security roles or update existing roles with additional forecast privileges.
• Enable preview feature option by navigating to Administration > System System > Previews.
• All the users under the selected hierarchy are assigned forecast manager or forecast user role. If not, the publishing of the forecast definition will fail.
• No users are disabled under the selected hierarchy when you publish the forecast definition. If not, the publishing of the forecast definition will fail.

Create a forecast Definition

1. Navigate to App Settings area.
2. In the site map, select Forecast definitions.
3. On the command bar, select New.
4. Fill in the details and Publish the Forecast definition to generate forecasts based on this definition.

Key things in Forecast Definition

• Forecast metric: Select a metric for forecasting. It is a lookup to the Goal metric entity.
• Quota source: Select whether the targets used for the purpose of forecasting will be based on existing goals or manual targets. If this is set to Goal-based, then when the forecast is being generated, the system looks for the matching goal based on the forecast metric and rollup query In-progress (Money) you’ve selected and the Goal owner and uses the quota/target defined in the goal.
• Rollup query: This is a lookup to the Rollup query entity. It works similar to Goal.
• Owner: If you are creating the forecast definition for yourself, choose your name as the owner. Otherwise, choose the username for whom you are creating the forecast definition. This user acts as the top of the forecast hierarchy. Based on the user hierarchy (as defined by the Manager field of the User object) a forecast is created for all child users.
• Number of forecasts: You can only create one forecast when the Forecast period is custom.
  If you select the Forecast period as monthly, Fiscal year as FY19, Start month as January, and Number of forecasts as 4, the forecasts that are generated are grouped by four months, January, February, March, and April. In such a case, the Forecast start and end date is automatically set to Jan 1, 2019, and April 30, 2019, respectively.

Capture forecast category for opportunity

1. Open an active opportunity and make sure you have the Forecast user role or equivalent permissions.
2. In the Forecast category drop-down list, select one of the following, and then select Save:

• Pipeline (low confidence): Any opportunity that a sales rep has just started to work on can be set to this category. The confidence of winning this opportunity is low. This is the default value.
• Best case (moderate confidence): When the sales rep has started talking to customers or has shared quotes, and there are moderate chances of winning the opportunity, change the forecast category to Best case (moderate confidence).
• Committed (high confidence): When the customer is positive and committed about closing the deal, change the category to Committed (high confidence).
• Omitted (exclude from forecast): If you want an opportunity’s numbers to be excluded from forecasting, use this category.

View forecasts

• Navigate to the Sales area.
• Click on Forecast under Performance section.
• The forecasts are grouped by the forecast period. Once expanded, you can see the list of the rolled-up forecast for everyone in the hierarchy.
• To check out which opportunities are contributing to a certain forecast, select the top-level forecast row, and on the command bar, select Show opportunities.

I hope I have given you enough summary to think about this feature and you will consider checking it out.
Till next time, Cheers 😉

References:

• Simple forecasting effective Sales Performance Management
• Create a Forecast Definition (Dynamics 365 for Sales)
• Capture forecast category for opportunity
• View forecasts