Foretend turns a sales team's gut insights into accurate forecasts.
Foretend helps sales leaders tap into a powerful forecasting tool: their team.
- Sales people gain insight into their companies, industries, and markets that never get captured in CRM or incorporated into sales forecasts.
- Foretend collects those gut insights and uses them as the raw ingredient for fast, accurate sales forecasts.
- Foretend complements existing forecasting methods and provides warning and opportunity signs to keep sales goals on track.
Collectively, the sales team knows what’ll happen.
Salesperson insight is one of the most powerful predictive data sources that sales organizations have. These insights can forecast key metrics weeks, or even months, faster than existing forecasting and business intelligence methods. These insights are forward-looking and can be used to develop strategy using what-if forecasting.
Foretend forecasting is different from, but complementary to, existing forecasting methods. Rather than using historical or event-generated data, Foretend harnesses the experiences, insights, and even hunches that salespersons have, adjusts them for their likely accuracy, and generates fast, accurate forecasts.
FAQs
- How does Foretend work?
Foretend emails weekly surveys to the sales team asking individuals to predict, based on their personal knowledge or insight, what will happen with certain key metrics in the weeks and months ahead. The raw responses from these surveys are weighted according to a salesperson’s track record for accuracy, and forecasts are generated based on these accuracy ratings. Because Foretend uses a “learning” methodology to assess who has the most accurate insight, it typically takes six weeks of forecasting to train the software for a new client. Even after the software is trained, over time results will become increasingly accurate as the software learns how to better assess the raw responses it receives.
- What types of forecasts can we generate with Foretend?
Foretends works for any metric that salespersons have personal insight into. Forecasts can be divided into categories covering different channels, markets, product types, or other metrics. Tracking forecasts can be generated on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis and what-if forecasts can be used to test strategy ideas. Examples of Foretend forecasts include:
- Weekly forecasting for quarterly sales growth
- Monthly forecasting for customer renewal and churn rates
- What-if strategy forecasting for reducing average time-to-signing for leads
- Monthly forecasts for market share and competitor trends
- How does Ekdesk help sales leaders with Foretend forecasting?
Ekdesk works with sales leaders to tailor their Foretend forecasting to their industry, markets, and products, and their overall forecasting needs.
In a typical engagement, Ekdesk generates weekly, monthly, and quarterly Foretend forecasts for 6-10 metrics that are key metrics for the client’s sales leaders. When sales leaders are considering strategy options and need to know the likely outcomes of those options, these ongoing forecasts are supplemented with what-if strategy forecasts.
- Are Foretend forecasts anonymous?
Unlike Ekdesk’s Sonar and Diamond tools, responses to Foretend surveys are not anonymous. Because Foretend uses a learning methodology to get more accurate over time, it tracks whether respondents are adding or subtracting accuracy from Forecasts and adjusts based on that tracking.
- Can we see which salespersons are the most accurate forecasters?
Yes! Foretend generates a leaderboard of forecasters based on how accurate they are. Sales leaders are encouraged to incent accurate forecast performance by recognizing or rewarding top forecasters. More, because top forecasters have demonstrated strong insight into their company, industry, or market, they are also a good source for internal consultation or potential advancement.