Salesforce Hygiene
Before you even being to improve your forecasting methodology you need to ensure you have ‘clean’ data in Salesforce. In theory this sounds simple, just do the following:
- Pick a day of the month you require your current in-month pipeline (close date, forecast category, stage and value) to be ‘clean’ (we recommend the 3rd business day of each month), and
- Pick a day of the quarter you require your in-quarterly pipeline to be cleaned (close date, forecast category, stage and value) to be ‘clean’ (if you’ve implemented QBRs, then this should be the day before your QBRs are due, otherwise, we would recommend the 7th – 10th day of the quarter)
**the best of the best will pick a single day each month and implement a rolling 3- or 6-month requirement for pipeline hygiene. This can be VERY tricky to maintain especially if all your other cadences are monthly and quarterly**
Like I said, in theory this sounds easy, but, it takes a lot more work because it can be an impactful change for your sales team, so effective change management is paramount in making this transition successful. You need to identify and communicate why you are making this change, why it is important to the business, and most importantly, why it is important to them (make sure to answer what’s in it for me). The best answer to this is typically explaining to them that the goal of Operations and Salesforce is not just accountability, but also good data science. And if we have accurate forecasting and clean pipelines, then we can more easily address issues with enough time to develop and create counter measure. [CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD A SIMPLE DECK THAT YOU CAN MODIFY TO ROLL OUT THIS CHANGE]