A forecast meeting agenda that gets results

Tips for making your CRM the key to forecast meeting success

DEAR STAGE 2: We hired 3 sales reps in the last quarter and I feel detached from our pipeline. Up until this point, my co-founder and I have been involved in every sale and this transition is making it difficult for us to forecast revenue accurately and keep a pulse on how deals are progressing. We’re instituting a weekly sales pipeline review with the entire team. How can we get the most out of this meeting? ~FRUSTRATED FOUNDER

DEAR FRUSTRATED FOUNDER: Scheduling and committing to a standing forecast meeting is a great start, but there’s so much more that goes into running an effective meeting. It’s easy to get lost in the details of one deal or spend an hour updating CRM fields when the team doesn’t arrive prepped. 

In order to make this meeting valuable to everyone involved, you need to set clear expectations up front. While the team is small, you can rely on this one meeting to have dual goals: 1) help you to get a clear and accurate picture of your pipeline and 2) to help determine where you should dig in deeper with your team to help unblock and progress deals. Over time, you might find that you need to break into smaller groups with narrower goals for each meeting (e.g. a Direct Sales team forecast, Account Management forecast, Big Deal Review, Leadership Team Commit Meeting, etc…). 

Regardless of the goals, the best forecast meetings start with consistent preparation which relies on a clean and structured CRM. 

With this in mind, I called on Brendan Tolleson, the CEO of RevPartners, a top HubSpot partner, RevOps expert and talented sales leader to share some advice on how to most effectively leverage your CRM for a proper sales forecast meeting. 

We’re going to assume you have already customized your deal stages within your CRM so they align with your sales process, assigned probabilities to each stage to estimate likelihood of closing and have a handle on your CRM’s reporting/analytics. Here’s what you do next…

BEFORE THE MEETING: Create an automated email or set a calendar event for the day before the standing meeting to remind the entire team to update the CRM and arrive prepared: 

• Ensure all sales data is clean and up to date

•  Remove duplicates from customer info

•  Add any notes and communication relevant to deal progress

DURING THE MEETING: One person needs to run the meeting and keep everyone on task. We recommend publishing a clear agenda to follow each week. Here are a few sample sections to get you started:

• Use the CRM to project the pipeline and analyze metrics 

  • Discuss and strategize–make changes to the forecast within the CRM

  • Leverage CRM’s collaboration features such as shared dashboards

• Record any decision made directly into the CRM to serve as a reference for future discussions

AFTER THE MEETING: Take note of action items, follow up with individual reps/customers to help progress deals, and reflect on the accuracy of your forecast. You should monitor and track the sales pipeline/sales forecast against actual results with the goal of improving forecast accuracy over time. 

If you’re interested in seeing this in action, Brendan shared a loom video to help bring it all to life. Dig in!

Until next week!