This article provides an overview of the steps you need to take when setting up Gong Forecast for your org. You can also go to the Gong Academy to do the setup training.
Tasks described in this article should be performed by a technical or business admin, depending on their roles in your organization.
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Your organization must be working with a Gong Professional or Enterprise plan in order to buy forecast seats. Your plan type is shown on the Team Members page. Read more about plans.
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Your Gong instance should be integrated with your CRM. Also, make sure you're importing all the relevant CRM fields. Learn more.
Decide who should have access to Gong Forecast
Quota-carrying reps and managers should have access to Gong Forecast, as well as SalesOps and other supporting individuals in your company. Also, think about how much visibility and control team members should have to team forecasts and targets of other team members.
Verify team hierarchy before giving access
Team hierarchy determines the relationship between directors, managers, and direct reports in Gong. An out-of-date org structure will mean that frontline managers don't see their direct reports on the Forecast page. If you provision team members automatically from a single source of truth (like Okta, Salesforce, Rippling, or OneLogin), you'll want to double-check and update your team hierarchy there.
1. Buy Forecast seats
You need to buy seats for team members working with Forecast. Contact your CRM for more information about purchasing seats.
The number of seats allocated and purchased appears in the Team Members settings page.
2. Set up Forecast permission profiles
Team members working with Forecast should be assigned permission profiles with Forecast permissions enabled.
Pages - Select the Forecast option to provide read-only access to the Forecast tab. This is a baseline permission that all Forecast users should have.
Select the Manage the forecast board and upload targets option to let users manage the forecast board settings, for example, to decide when to lock forecasts.
Permissions - Provide granular visibility and control to forecasts of teams and team members. Permissions cover:
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Viewing forecasts, for example, view pipeline information. Learn more.
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Editing forecasts, for example, updating numbers for each forecast category. Learn more.
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Editing targets. If you want users to edit targets, you must select the ALL option when defining permissions. This allows the user to upload a CSV file with the team targets. Learn more.
We recommend two unique permission profiles for team members using Gong Forecast.
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Use one profile for sales reps and for frontline managers, with the following settings.
Selecting these settings lets users view and edit their own forecasts and targets, as well as those of the people who report to them. Users who do not have direct reports will be able to view and edit their own forecasts and targets.
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Use another profile for Forecast administrators, with the following settings.
Selecting these settings lets users view and edit the entire team's forecasts and targets.
Large enterprises can explore adding more profiles to allow various levels of visibility and control for different team roles.
If you are a new customer, your system may have been set up with two default Forecast profiles: one for Business admins and another for Standard users. Customers already working with Gong can duplicate existing profiles and add new Forecast permissions.
Read about how to create Forecast permission profiles.
You’re done!
As soon as team members are assigned Forecast permission profiles, they'll see the Forecast tab on the Deals page. At this point, the admin/sales ops/manager can set up forecast boards so that people can start forecasting. To learn more about forecasting, read Gong Forecast from A-Z.
If you would like to talk to Gong support regarding an issue or ask any questions related to forecasting in Gong, send an email to forecasting.support@gong.io with a description of your issue, and one of our Technical Support Engineers will get back to you shortly.