Purpose
The purpose of this article is to provide Outreach Users with information about how to review, edit, and submit forecasts within Outreach Commit.
Intended Audience
- Outreach Admins
- Outreach Users
How to review, edit, and submit forecasts in Outreach Commit
With forecasting in Outreach Commit, you can easily review, edit and submit your call in a simple interface that provides you with visibility down to each unique deal that makes up the forecast.
To access the forecasting feature from your Outreach Commit home page, navigate to the “Forecasting” tab on the left-hand side of your screen.
Within the forecasting overview, you will see various columns, depending on your Outreach Commit configuration, depicting your forecast calls. In the example below, there are multiple forecast category-level calls (e.g.Commit, Best Case, and Pipeline).
Each individual rep call automatically rolls up to the next tier in the team hierarchy, to make up their leadership's rollup by the forecast. Below you will find an example of a team-level forecast view where the rep team rollup is $173k, while the manager’s submitted forecast is $200k.
You also have the ability to drill into a specific seller and review their forecast in detail, to identify exactly which deals make up the forecast across the various call categories. To dive into additional details for a specific deal, click on the deal name to access information such as forecasting signals and activity history.
Managers can override individual rep-level calls by adjusting the call up or down as appropriate. These values are simply an overlay on top of the actual amounts the sellers have entered. Outreach Commit will use these overridden values to calculate your rolled-up forecast and will show you where you've made changes with an info tooltip as depicted in the screenshot below.
Once you've finished reviewing your forecast call, click Submit button to enter supporting commentary, which will be saved along with your forecast and visible to others in your organization who can see this forecast. Managers above you in the team hierarchy have visibility of this submitted forecast.
How are my forecasting category values determined?
Control for configuration of parallel forecasting resides in the Commit Admin experience. Any customer with an “admin” role type will be able to create, configure, and publish forecasts. Visibility of the created forecasts can be segmented by team hierarchy level and role type and is defined by the Commit admin. For more information on the Forecast admin experience, check out the forecasting admin configuration article.
Submitting Forecasts in Future Time Periods
To submit a forecast in a future time period (e.g., Next Quarter), simply select the appropriate period from the Sales Period drop-down list, and then enter and submit your forecast.
When viewing the submitted forecast history modal, it will automatically surface the forecasts submitted within the selected time period.
Viewing Last Period’s Forecast
To review your final forecast numbers from the last period, select the last period from the Sales Period drop-down list (e.g., Last Quarter).
© 2022 Outreach.io