Automate sales forecast in IS standard documents with ease

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now that we've spoken about building the sales organization and our go-to-market model the final part is how to manage the sales organization the first part of managing a sales organization and it's really building a capacity and an understanding for forecasting and forecasting is really really important not only to hold salespeople accountable for what they say they will do but more importantly it becomes a basis on how you manage the company if a company says they're gonna do X the next quarter and Y the quarter after we want to make sure that we're really gonna go hit those numbers forecasting accuracy is really about long-term investment and the forecast is how well are we gonna do against our plan we're always trying to balance growth and burn and forecasting is a very important ingredient to help manage our expensive forecast comes out low we might want to reduce our burn okay and if the forecast is higher than planned you may want to increase burn the accuracy of these numbers is super important because of sales mis forecasts and mis forecast Lo and you reduce the burn on an inaccurate forecast you're inadvertently hurting the company because you're not investing so I would say the most important thing about forecasting given its balance between art and science one of the most important things is transparency if no one puts accurate information into salesforce.com you're never going to have accurate information out and so what you want to try to encourage in your sales organization is that sales reps directors and VPS are all very transparent about what's happening in their accounts such as you get truthful information and there's always a tendency for people to sandbag which would be under forecast and over-deliver that's a very natural tendency it's like oh I'm gonna I'm gonna undershoot and over-deliver everyone's gonna call mahira the impact of that is that you're gonna reduce burn and probably reduce the potential accompany the other is probably arguably even worse they overshoot so let's say they forecast higher than plan you then take up the burn to say okay we're doing better and if this isn't accurate and they miss that number they miss the new forecast now your expenses have increased to a disproportional level relative to plan so forecasting accuracy is really really important and I would say that once a company goes public or gets into an IPO flow of getting ready to go public forecasting is probably the most important thing that you do because Wall Street is banking on you to be have very accurate predictions about what's going to happen in the future and a lot of companies stock trades are based on the accuracy the predictability of your company to hit the numbers that they say they're going to hit so building the hygiene into your organization early on relative to forecasting is very important for the long-term success of the business and how you modulate expenses relative to that and that then in turn is a function of how you can grow your company