Enabling Forecasting and Pipeline Management Capabilities in Outreach – Outreach Support

Overview

Forecasting and Pipeline Management brings predictability to Outreach’s Sales Execution Platform by helping revenue leaders optimize their pipeline, gain confidence in its health, and forecast with the highest possible accuracy. Learn about the requirements and how to enable Outreach’s forecasting and pipeline management features below.

(For an comprehensive summary of these new capabilities and the requirements to access them, see our Overview of Forecasting and Pipeline Management.)

Applies To

Outreach Admins
Salesforce CRM

Enabling Forecasting and Pipeline Management Capabilities

For organizations with forecasting and pipeline management included in their Outreach package, a new Forecasting Settings page will be available in the Tools area in the Outreach Administration.

Complete the Prerequisites Checklist

The Prerequisites checklist will walk you through the steps needed to ensure that your Outreach CRM configuration is updated to reflect our best practices and that you have imported the necessary Opportunity records and fields into Outreach, before beginning your Forecasting configuration.

Note: If separate Outreach Admins are responsible for managing CRM configuration and your Forecasting setup, both Admins must collaborate to ensure the prerequisites are implemented before beginning your Forecasting.

CRM Sync

Important: To ensure your Forecasting and Pipeline Management capabilities in Outreach work as expected, your CRM Plugin must follow the best practices outlined in the CRM Configuration guide for Forecasting and Pipeline Management.

Enabling the new Outreach Navigation

Enable the new Outreach Navigation menu for your Organization by following the guide here.

Setting Sales Period and Fiscal Year Start

Choosing your organization’s sales period length and fiscal year start month is found within the Org info settings in Outreach Administration.

Import Opportunities

For best results, we recommend that customers sync historical data representing at least 3 sales periods. The more historical data that you sync into Outreach, the more in-depth analysis it can provide.

Follow this guide to import Opportunities from a Salesforce Report.

Enable Forecasting and Pipeline Management

Once you have completed the above prerequisites, you can click to Enable forecasting & pipeline management, ensuring that all opportunity data in Outreach aligns with what exists in your CRM.

Once these features are enabled, you will no longer be able to manually create Opportunity records in Outreach or import them via a CSV file.

Note: Completion may take some time as Outreach will be processing data behind the scenes. You may return to this page later to continue with the setup.

Configuration

Once the Forecasting & pipeline management features have been enabled, continue with the following setup steps:

User Enablement

Validate your Forecast configuration

Confirm that the forecasts shown on the Forecast rollup page adhere to your sales forecasting process.

Update your Profile configuration

Ensure that your users have the right Profile settings to ensure that they have the appropriate level of access to Forecasting capabilities in Outreach. An overview of Forecasting profile settings is available here.