Forecasting Best Practices in Outreach Commit

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 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 category-level calls (e.g. Forecast Call, Open Call (CARR)).

Each individual seller’s call automatically rolls up to the next tier in the team hierarchy, to make up their leadership's "Current Forecast". Below you will find an example of a team-level forecast view

You should 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 detail for a specific deal, you can click on the deal name to access information such as deal health signals and activity history.

Managers should be able to override individual rep-level calls*, by adjusting the call up or down as appropriate. Outreach Commit does not write this change back to your CRM. These values are simply an overlay on top of the actual amounts the seller has entered. Outreach Commit will use your 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.

You can also make changes at the call category level, rather than seller-by-seller. If you use the category-level override, you cannot also use seller-level overrides, as they are superseded.

*Note: You will only be able to override calls for sellers that are part of a team that is one tier below yours within the Outreach Commit team hierarchy. If the seller is more than one tier below you, you will not have this permission.

Once you've finished reviewing your total forecast, clicking the blue Submit button will allow you to enter any additional comments, which will be saved along with your forecast and visible to others in your org who can see your forecast. Your manager (if applicable) will also be able to see a timestamp on when you've last updated your forecast.

How are my forecasting category values determined?

By default, Outreach Commit automatically maps to the forecast category field in your CRM (if it is in use). If you aren't using a forecast category field, Outreach Commit may set up a custom mapping to a field of your choice that helps to "bucket" deals according to likelihood or according to your desired forecast breakdown.