Recipe: Cross check your team's forecast

Who’s this for? Sales Managers

Outcome: This recipe helps you quickly achieve high confidence that your forecast to management contains only deals that are on track to close

Frequency: Weekly or monthly, depending on your forecasting cadence

Your steps

Step 1: Ensure your team has updated their opportunity stages and forecast status with enough time for you to cross check before sending your forecast rollup. Go to the Gong deal board and filter to see the deals for everyone in your team for the relevant time period (e.g. deals closing this quarter, or this month). You can declutter the view by showing only open deals. The deal count and total amount at the top of the page should stack up with your expectations.

Step 2: Sort the opportunity list by account name, amount, or stage to home in on the deals that will make or break your forecast. You’ll likely apply more scrutiny to the opportunities being forecast by more junior or less tenured reps, so use the filter to view an individual rep’s pipeline.

Tip: If you need to make a last minute check while on-the-go, you can review your Deal Board on the Gong mobile app.

Step 3: For deals in your committed or upside forecast, look for evidence that they are on track to close:

• Is there enough bi-directional activity—not just rep outreach—to indicate healthy engagement?

• Are next calls scheduled soon enough to maintain deal velocity?

• Are there any Gong deal warnings?

Step 4: Go deeper on key deals. Click into the deal to see a detailed view of the communication back-and-forth on the the Account page:

• Open the engagement map from the account timeline. Is there a healthy level of multi-threading?

• Do you have the right titles engaged to close the deal? Are they active in conversations, rather than passive?

• Review the latest emails and calls exchanged with key contacts. Is the back-and-forth consistent with a deal that’s on track or one that’s going to push?

Step 5: Align with the relevant reps on deals that might need to be pulled in or out of the forecast, by tagging them in comments attached to the account. This way you can resolve issues by having a conversation tied directly to the context of the account activity, without waiting for your next face-to-face or forecast meeting.

Tip: Encourage your reps to tag you on account or call comments so that they can draw attention to issues or get your input before your 1:1 meetings.

Step 6: Make the adjustments you need to roll up your forecast with confidence.