Palo Alto, CA, July 19, 2022 – With economic headwinds blowing, just 27% of sales professionals agree that their revenue forecasting process delivers accurate results and only 24% of sales leaders are confident in their team’s forecast, making it difficult to properly plan, identify focus areas, and spur growth opportunities. These are among the findings of the “Reality of Forecasting Report,” a survey of 928 sales and revenue professionals on the state of revenue forecasting from Gong, the Reality Platform™ leveraging artificial intelligence to transform go-to-market teams.
In good times, revenue forecasting is difficult. The process is labor-intensive, requiring input from an entire revenue organization and the consolidation of thousands of data points, from multiple sources, across multiple tools. It’s also convoluted, using a combination of historical models, anecdotal data, and “gut feelings” on deals in process to predict future sales.
Today, accurately forecasting revenue is more challenging because of growing economic uncertainty, international conflict, and other external factors outside of a company’s control.
Across all respondents, external factors had the third most significant impact on forecast confidence, behind only internal perceptions and opinions and lack of visibility into deals. As a result, more than half of all respondents (52%) report placing greater emphasis on producing an accurate forecast due to current economic uncertainty. In addition, Gong’s “Reality of Forecasting Survey” showed that:
In the report, Gong identifies how the adoption of four principles throughout an organization can transform the forecasting process:
“As a sales leader, driving consistent, predictable revenue for your business is what it is all about,” said Gong Chief Revenue Officer Ryan Longfield. “Forecast accurately quarter after quarter ensures the entire organization is aligned to a revenue number that can be trusted to guide strategic planning, identify opportunities, and drive overall growth. Yet so much of forecasting has been based on opinions and incomplete, expired information. Our report shows that injecting reality into forecasting is critical to consistent accuracy, especially in tough economic times when using historical data to predict the future is no longer reliable.”
To download the full Reality of Forecasting Report visit the report landing page.
About Gong
Gong unlocks reality to help people and companies reach their full potential. The Reality Platform™ autonomously empowers customer-facing teams to take advantage of their most valuable assets – customer interactions, which the Gong platform captures and analyzes. Gong then delivers insights at scale, enabling revenue and go-to-market teams to determine the best actions for repeatable winning outcomes. More than 3,000 innovative companies like Morningstar Inc., Paychex, LinkedIn, Shopify, Slack, SproutSocial, Twilio, and Zillow trust Gong to power their business reality. For more information, please visit www.gong.io.
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