Enabling Forecasting and Pipeline Management Capabilities in Outreach

Purpose

This article aims to inform Outreach Admins about the requirements and steps to enable Outreach’s forecasting and pipeline management features.

Intended Audience

• Outreach Admins

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. You can review an overview of these new capabilities & requirements to access them here.

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 under Org Info > General page in Outreach Administration. Forecasting and Pipeline Management are only accessible through the updated left navigation. 

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 enable the Forecasting & pipeline management features. Note: this process 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, you can continue with the following setup steps:

1. Configure the User Rollup
2. Define Goals i.e. Quota
3. Configure your Forecasts

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.