November 18, 2024
Research indicates that over 90% of B2B enterprise sales organizations will continue relying on their intuition-based decisions rather than using advanced data analytics.
This resistance—whether due to an aversion to change or a reluctance to complicate the sales tech stack—often leads to inaccurate forecasts, flawed sales pipelines, and missed quotas.
So how can you break free from this trend while consistently hitting your sales targets?
The answer lies in embracing accurate, data-driven sales forecasting.
Let’s explore the 10 best sales forecasting tools to help your team predict trends and evaluate the performance of past sales initiatives.
A sales forecast estimates how much your organization plans to sell within a specific period (a quarter or a year).
Usually, sales forecasting tools leverage historical data, market trends, and in-house data to:
Think of sales forecasts as predicting the weather. Meteorologists use advanced tools to analyze climate patterns and weather data to decide if you'll need an umbrella or sunglasses. Similarly, sales professionals rely on CRM tools and analytics to stay prepared, adapt, and seize opportunities while minimizing risks.
Sudden shifts in weather mirror market changes or the arrival of new competitors in sales—both requiring ongoing alertness and the ability to adapt quickly. The goal is to prepare and respond effectively, minimizing risks and capitalizing on opportunities.
Typically, there are two types of sales forecasting:
The real power of sales forecasting is in its accuracy in matching your product or service supply with actual demand. Accurate forecasting equips you with the right amount, ensuring you don't miss these opportunities.
For example, if you forecast demand for 6 cupcakes but have 10 customers, you'd lose 4 sales. The same logic applies to all businesses–meeting demand accurately can boost sales and prevent missed opportunities. Accuracy is especially vital for SaaS businesses in resource allocation, budgeting, identification of potential cash flow challenges, setting realistic revenue targets, and much more.
Pipedrive is highly regarded for its visual and user-friendly design that aids in organizing pipelines and taking actionable steps. It offers comprehensive performance reports and a customizable Forecast View for regular planning and course correction. The Insights Revenue Forecast feature, available in the Professional and Enterprise plans, provides powerful revenue predictions.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Pipedrive offers several subscription plans, but for sales forecasting, you’ll need the Professional plan at $49.90/user/month (billed annually).
Free Trial: Free 14-day Professional plan trial
Zendesk Sell’s advanced sales reporting and dashboards provide real-time insights and projections, making it easy to track progress. It uses historical trends to assess the likelihood of success and estimate close dates by integrating forecast data directly into each deal. This allows you to focus on high-priority deals with the best chances of winning, streamlining your sales strategy for maximum efficiency.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Team: $19 per user/month, Growth: $55 per user/month, Professional: $115 per user/month, Enterprise: Contact sales
Free Trial: Free 14-day trial
Clari is another popular sales forecasting tool preferred by B2B sales leaders to shorten sales cycles and gain accurate sales forecasts. It offers real-time visualizations, tracks forecast changes and provides features for pipeline inspection, account engagement, CRM automation, and revenue intelligence.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Available upon request
Free Trial: Free demo available upon request
Gong.io is a revenue intelligence platform helping businesses engage with their customers, forecast sales accurately, and enhance team productivity.
Gong’s Deal Boards offer a streamlined way to monitor key deals, metrics, and insights, with a customizable pipeline view. It also stands out for its user-friendly interface, coupled with powerful reporting and visualization features that simplify tracking sales performance and improve decision-making.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Contact for a customized proposal
Free Trial: Not available
Avoma's AI Forecasting Assistant offers complete visibility into your deal pipeline and builds accurate revenue by coupling AI-powered insights from customer conversations with CRM data. Its Forecasting Assistant's dashboard allows close monitoring of team revenue attainment, prioritizing deals, identifying risks, and offering mitigation strategies.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Plans start at $19/user/mo. For forecasting features, you will need the business plan at $79/user/mo.
Free Trial: Free 14 days trial
Weflow optimizes sales forecasting by simplifying the submission, review, and tracking of changes in Salesforce. It supports collaborative forecasting, enhances data accuracy, and automates the syncing of sales activities, ensuring comprehensive CRM data.
Features like bulk editing, deal alerts, and note templates help improve adherence to sales processes, leading to more reliable revenue predictions.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: For the sales forecasting platform, it’s $55/mo per user. No platform fees.
Free Trial: Free 14 days trial
Mediafly Intelligence360 is an AI-driven sales forecasting software that eliminates the need for spreadsheets. It simplifies forecasting with machine learning-driven metrics, ensuring accurate and validated predictions.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Contact Mediafly for pricing
Free Trial: Free 60 days trial period
Salesforce's Sales Cloud offers powerful pipeline management and forecasting tools, especially beneficial for businesses with diverse product lines. It allows for extensive customization, enabling you to filter data, adjust forecasts, and set custom date ranges for revenue and other key metrics based on user roles or territory hierarchies.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Starter: $25 per user/month, Professional: $100 per user/month, Enterprise: $165 per user/month, Unlimited: $330 per user/month. Forecasting features are unavailable in the starter package.
Free Trial: Free 30 days trial period
Anaplan leverages predictive insights to highlight the best revenue opportunities. This sales forecasting tool offers detailed analysis by geography, product line, or account, down to specific cities or product SKUs, providing a comprehensive view of your pipeline.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Contact Anaplan for pricing
Free Trial: Free 90 days trial period
Promising 98% accuracy, Aviso is a sales-focused AI-powered solution that employs a unified forecasting approach that combines human judgment with its advanced predictive sales forecasting AI feature.
It provides solutions for remote sales collaboration and advanced revenue operations, making it a valuable addition to your tech stack. However, Aviso lacks CRM capabilities, so you'll need an existing CRM system to avoid alignment issues. Additionally, integrating non-CRM software with your sales data may require extra steps.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Contact Aviso for a custom quote
Free trial: Free 30 days trial period
While the future is uncertain, accurate sales forecasting helps navigate it.
Accurate sales forecasting is paramount, especially in today's competitive, challenging market where every deal and dollar counts.
Dive into the aforementioned list of best sales forecasting tools and review their features to find the perfect match for your business requirements.
However, before proceeding, consider whether you have a clear understanding of next month's demand or if you risk missing out on sales and revenue. The best tools can unlock crucial insights to ensure you’re fully prepared.
Factors such as user-friendliness, accuracy, predictive analytics ability, integration with your CRM software, scalability and sales projection, customization, etc., can be crucial when choosing the right tool.
To use Excel's Forecast Sheet tool, input your historical sales data, highlight the range, and navigate to the Data tab to select ‘Create Forecast Sheet.’ Excel will generate projections using linear regression automatically, but you can enhance accuracy by adjusting settings like seasonality and confidence intervals.
The following KPIs and metrics are typically used for effective sales forecasting:
AI-powered sales forecasting can provide valuable insights into improving lead scoring and pipeline management, maximizing customer lifetime value, boosting customer retention, and enhancing performance management.
Research indicates that over 90% of B2B enterprise sales organizations will continue relying on their intuition-based decisions rather than using advanced data analytics.
This resistance—whether due to an aversion to change or a reluctance to complicate the sales tech stack—often leads to inaccurate forecasts, flawed sales pipelines, and missed quotas.
So how can you break free from this trend while consistently hitting your sales targets?
The answer lies in embracing accurate, data-driven sales forecasting.
Let’s explore the 10 best sales forecasting tools to help your team predict trends and evaluate the performance of past sales initiatives.
A sales forecast estimates how much your organization plans to sell within a specific period (a quarter or a year).
Usually, sales forecasting tools leverage historical data, market trends, and in-house data to:
Think of sales forecasts as predicting the weather. Meteorologists use advanced tools to analyze climate patterns and weather data to decide if you'll need an umbrella or sunglasses. Similarly, sales professionals rely on CRM tools and analytics to stay prepared, adapt, and seize opportunities while minimizing risks.
Sudden shifts in weather mirror market changes or the arrival of new competitors in sales—both requiring ongoing alertness and the ability to adapt quickly. The goal is to prepare and respond effectively, minimizing risks and capitalizing on opportunities.
Typically, there are two types of sales forecasting:
The real power of sales forecasting is in its accuracy in matching your product or service supply with actual demand. Accurate forecasting equips you with the right amount, ensuring you don't miss these opportunities.
For example, if you forecast demand for 6 cupcakes but have 10 customers, you'd lose 4 sales. The same logic applies to all businesses–meeting demand accurately can boost sales and prevent missed opportunities. Accuracy is especially vital for SaaS businesses in resource allocation, budgeting, identification of potential cash flow challenges, setting realistic revenue targets, and much more.
Pipedrive is highly regarded for its visual and user-friendly design that aids in organizing pipelines and taking actionable steps. It offers comprehensive performance reports and a customizable Forecast View for regular planning and course correction. The Insights Revenue Forecast feature, available in the Professional and Enterprise plans, provides powerful revenue predictions.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Pipedrive offers several subscription plans, but for sales forecasting, you’ll need the Professional plan at $49.90/user/month (billed annually).
Free Trial: Free 14-day Professional plan trial
Zendesk Sell’s advanced sales reporting and dashboards provide real-time insights and projections, making it easy to track progress. It uses historical trends to assess the likelihood of success and estimate close dates by integrating forecast data directly into each deal. This allows you to focus on high-priority deals with the best chances of winning, streamlining your sales strategy for maximum efficiency.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Team: $19 per user/month, Growth: $55 per user/month, Professional: $115 per user/month, Enterprise: Contact sales
Free Trial: Free 14-day trial
Clari is another popular sales forecasting tool preferred by B2B sales leaders to shorten sales cycles and gain accurate sales forecasts. It offers real-time visualizations, tracks forecast changes and provides features for pipeline inspection, account engagement, CRM automation, and revenue intelligence.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Available upon request
Free Trial: Free demo available upon request
Gong.io is a revenue intelligence platform helping businesses engage with their customers, forecast sales accurately, and enhance team productivity.
Gong’s Deal Boards offer a streamlined way to monitor key deals, metrics, and insights, with a customizable pipeline view. It also stands out for its user-friendly interface, coupled with powerful reporting and visualization features that simplify tracking sales performance and improve decision-making.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Contact for a customized proposal
Free Trial: Not available
Avoma's AI Forecasting Assistant offers complete visibility into your deal pipeline and builds accurate revenue by coupling AI-powered insights from customer conversations with CRM data. Its Forecasting Assistant's dashboard allows close monitoring of team revenue attainment, prioritizing deals, identifying risks, and offering mitigation strategies.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Plans start at $19/user/mo. For forecasting features, you will need the business plan at $79/user/mo.
Free Trial: Free 14 days trial
Weflow optimizes sales forecasting by simplifying the submission, review, and tracking of changes in Salesforce. It supports collaborative forecasting, enhances data accuracy, and automates the syncing of sales activities, ensuring comprehensive CRM data.
Features like bulk editing, deal alerts, and note templates help improve adherence to sales processes, leading to more reliable revenue predictions.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: For the sales forecasting platform, it’s $55/mo per user. No platform fees.
Free Trial: Free 14 days trial
Mediafly Intelligence360 is an AI-driven sales forecasting software that eliminates the need for spreadsheets. It simplifies forecasting with machine learning-driven metrics, ensuring accurate and validated predictions.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Contact Mediafly for pricing
Free Trial: Free 60 days trial period
Salesforce's Sales Cloud offers powerful pipeline management and forecasting tools, especially beneficial for businesses with diverse product lines. It allows for extensive customization, enabling you to filter data, adjust forecasts, and set custom date ranges for revenue and other key metrics based on user roles or territory hierarchies.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Starter: $25 per user/month, Professional: $100 per user/month, Enterprise: $165 per user/month, Unlimited: $330 per user/month. Forecasting features are unavailable in the starter package.
Free Trial: Free 30 days trial period
Anaplan leverages predictive insights to highlight the best revenue opportunities. This sales forecasting tool offers detailed analysis by geography, product line, or account, down to specific cities or product SKUs, providing a comprehensive view of your pipeline.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Contact Anaplan for pricing
Free Trial: Free 90 days trial period
Promising 98% accuracy, Aviso is a sales-focused AI-powered solution that employs a unified forecasting approach that combines human judgment with its advanced predictive sales forecasting AI feature.
It provides solutions for remote sales collaboration and advanced revenue operations, making it a valuable addition to your tech stack. However, Aviso lacks CRM capabilities, so you'll need an existing CRM system to avoid alignment issues. Additionally, integrating non-CRM software with your sales data may require extra steps.
Key Forecasting Features:
Pricing: Contact Aviso for a custom quote
Free trial: Free 30 days trial period
While the future is uncertain, accurate sales forecasting helps navigate it.
Accurate sales forecasting is paramount, especially in today's competitive, challenging market where every deal and dollar counts.
Dive into the aforementioned list of best sales forecasting tools and review their features to find the perfect match for your business requirements.
However, before proceeding, consider whether you have a clear understanding of next month's demand or if you risk missing out on sales and revenue. The best tools can unlock crucial insights to ensure you’re fully prepared.
Factors such as user-friendliness, accuracy, predictive analytics ability, integration with your CRM software, scalability and sales projection, customization, etc., can be crucial when choosing the right tool.
To use Excel's Forecast Sheet tool, input your historical sales data, highlight the range, and navigate to the Data tab to select ‘Create Forecast Sheet.’ Excel will generate projections using linear regression automatically, but you can enhance accuracy by adjusting settings like seasonality and confidence intervals.
The following KPIs and metrics are typically used for effective sales forecasting:
AI-powered sales forecasting can provide valuable insights into improving lead scoring and pipeline management, maximizing customer lifetime value, boosting customer retention, and enhancing performance management.
