How to Forecast Better and Close More Deals with Ebsta Score

Forecasting can be a challenging task. As a Sales Manager, you’re asked to look into the future, predict the probable behavior of numerous sales team members and countless customers, and commit “a number” to your management team.

These numbers are then rolled up into an overall forecast and countless decisions are based on that number (from production capacity, to hiring decisions, to investment decisions, etc.).

Other than gut feeling and past experiences, many Sales Managers don’t have a defined process for how they arrive at these numbers, or an explanation as to why they think their forecast will be more accurate this time than it was last month or quarter. Furthermore, with a lack of activity recorded into Salesforce topped with misleading reporting that is generally one-dimensional, understanding client engagement is merely impossible, forcing Sales Managers to manually review all records and open activity.

Here at Ebsta, we believe in having accurate insight into exactly what’s going on with your customers and prospects. We know that accurate forecasting of lead conversion rates, expected sales and client retention rates is key to increasing sales, providing outstanding customer service and achieving a net negative churn. We also believe that the most important part of a sales process is building a meaningful relationship. Relationships are built upon engagement and consistent, high-quality activity.

However, there’s no easy way to measure or understand this because:

• Activity isn’t recorded
• Reporting on standard fields, such as last activity date, is misleading and doesn’t tell the full story

Ebsta Score

We’ve developed a reporting tool to enable companies to automatically integrate with emails, calls, and telephony systems. This tool is called the Ebsta Score.

The Ebsta Score is a number between 0-100 that represents real-time engagement. The more high-quality interactions your company has with a Contact, Opportunity, Lead or Account – the higher their Score.

It allows Sales Managers to accurately track their Reps’ engagement with every Lead, Contact, Account and Opportunity in Salesforce and proactively identify risk. Such insights help to optimise performance and prioritise engagement to increase pipeline, improve forecasting, shorten sales cycles and reduce churn.

So, the benefits of better forecasting is clear. But, how exactly does the Ebsta Score work?
The Ebsta Score will help you to understand the engagement metrics through your full sales cycle.

Let’s take the sales cycle for example. You have leads generated that need to be prioritized, you then need to manage your pipeline and opportunities, and lastly retain customers through consistent engagement. Through all of these stages, you would have no idea if your reps are engaged with customers or not, and so, your key focus is to make sure your teams engage with the right contacts at the right time.

Now, as we already know, the Ebsta Score would show you a value out of 100. Let’s say for instance the client in question has an Ebsta Score of 20. This tells us that the client has a poor health score. Which in return means that we are not engaging with a client that is about to renew. The Ebsta Score will help you to analyze the engagement and make sure that your Sales rep proactively engages with the client in order to win this deal.

Insights and Reports

Additionally to the Ebsta Score, Ebsta’s out of the box reporting shows you all open opportunities in a month. To top it all off, you’ll be able to manage your sales pipeline by identifying opportunities at risk, and will allow you to intervene proactively to win deals before a deal is lost.

As a sales manager, you want to have full visibility of all activity taking place in your team. The Ebsta’s Reporting functionality will allow you to not only view how well each sales rep is performing, but also get insight into all accounts with the highest to lowest engagement activity. This can be leveraged to make sure your Sales reps follow up on the hottest leads and ultimately drive revenue growth.

The sooner you unearth problems in your reporting, the sooner you can resolve issues that might be slowing you down.

So, in short, if you want to make informed decisions that contribute to your company’s bottom line, improving forecasting and reporting must be at the top of your to-do list, and one of the ways to do this is through Ebsta Reporting.

Click here to register for next week’s webinar: How to Maximise Revenue at Every Funnel Stage with Ebsta Score. Here we will be walking through engagement metrics to help teams prioritise activities throughout the sales cycle and essentially close more deals.