Drill into your forecast numbers

Who's this for? Account Executives, Frontline Managers, Manager of Managers

Where to go? Deals > Forecast

Plan: Working with Gong Forecast requires a Forecast seat.

Go deeper into the deals behind the numbers in one click. Here's how you can get more granular on the deals making up each forecast category.

Go here to learn how to update your numbers.

View your line of business

If your organization forecasts for more than 1 line of business, select the line of business you want to view.

View your forecast by month or by quarter

At the top of the forecast board, choose whether you want to see your forecast by the month or by the quarter.

The forecast numbers in the board and the drill-down view reflect the selected period.

Accurate forecast even with changes to the team

If you have people joining, moving teams, or leaving the company, we will automatically allocate target attainment, even mid-cycle/period.

You can see the allocation in Forecast and in Analytics > Trends, with informative labels next to people's avatars to indicate anyone that is inactive, new to the team, or moved between teams.

Review your forecast by month

When your forecast board is set to show a month, the drill-down panel shows info for the current month only.

The drill-down panel has 4 tabs: Forecast, Changes, Audit log, and CRM details.

Forecast tab

Here you can:

• Update your number.

• Add context and notes about your forecast.

• See the forecast projection based on historical sales in a period - more on projection.

• See deal values and drill down into deals and all relevant deal activities - communications, contacts, or risks.

• Click VIEW next to the category to generate a deal board in the Pipeline tab that shows all the deals in the category. From here, you can drill into deals as you normally do when inspecting your pipeline.

  Admins can customize this board's columns, and select the fields that can be edited and synced to your CRM.

• Inspect each deal - click to open a panel where you can see an account overview, contacts, activity, warnings, and update CRM fields, and jump to opening the account page or view the deal in your CRM or another third party application you have integrated to Gong.

Changes tab

Gong learns about changes to your deals from your CRM. The Changes tab shows deals that have moved in and out of each forecast category per week.

Audit log tab

The log includes all changes to the forecast category for the month/quarter, including the deal value and any commentary.

CRM details tab

Review and update critical CRM fields when inspecting a deal or calling your number. Define the fields in this tab in the board settings.

Review your forecast by quarter

When your forecast board is set to show a quarter, you also get an expanded view for each calendar month in the quarter, in addition to the current month’s drill-down pane (with the Forecast, Changes, and Update log tabs described above).

Here you can:

• See the details of the forecast for each month.

• The actual sales closed-won (the sum of closed-won deals) for past months is shown in green.

• Edit the quarterly forecast number, unless it's autocalculated.

  If autocalculation is on, you'll see the forecasted number for the quarter, which is calculated from the actual number landed on for closed months plus the forecast number for open months in the quarter.

• Add context and notes.

• See deal information, similar to what’s shown in the month view forecast categories.

• See the actual numbers closed.

  For past quarters, the actual total of actual sales is shown for each month, for the quarter. The deals that make up this number is defined your organization in the forecast board settings.

  For quarters in progress, the calculation will take the actual total from months in the past and the forecast total for months not yet closed.

Tip: An updated number will be carried over until the last week of the calendar month OR until another update is made during the same month.

Carried over numbers stop being carried over when a new month begins.

• For weeks when a number was updated or carried over, the number is included in the trend line and the person is not marked as missing in the tooltip.

• For weeks when there is no number updated or carried over, there is no number to include in the trend line, and the person is marked as missing in the tooltip.

• If a person hasn't updated their number at all during the forecast period, they are excluded from the forecast trend line, and are marked as missing for every week in the forecast period.Use this view to take a look at your history, and answer questions like: Where did we end up? What did we call? Were we accurate or not?