Assisting in One-on-One and Team Forecast Reviews

[James Foley]

I was hoping for a bit of advice from sales managers who are users of salesforce with respect to best practices in forecast review meetings.

We use salesforce extensively across the company and find it invaluable for contact/opportunity management etc.

One area that we haven't found it working for us is to help the sales managers in their one-on-one reviews with the account execs, and also at a VP Sales level in team forecast reviews.

At issue is that while in both these type of review meetings we are live on salesforce looking at opportunities and forecasts, when it comes to making committments in these meetings we record all these down on paper. This allows us next meeting to look at what was discussed in the previous meeting, what was committed and to compare this against what actually happened.

Clearly this is dumb.

Ideally we'd like to have some sort of 'layer' on top of the opportunity that the sales managers or vp can pull down and look at what's been agreed at the previous one-on-ones, what the account execs have said they would achieve in terms of commit and best-case compared to what was actually done.

The sales reps themselves can obviously changed their forecast category at will, but what we need is some formal record of what was agreed at the previous one-on-ones and what actually happened in a format that cannot be changed by the sales reps themselves.

Is there any recommendations, or good third-party tools that can be used to manage the one-on-one process, lock down committments and compare what the reps said they would do to what was actually achieved ?

Ideas or recommendations would be much appreciated.

Kind regards from London

James 

[Jillian80]

Did anyone get back to you regarding this?