Who’s Attending your Forecast Review Meeting?

As sales teams at early stage companies grow, they have a tendency to carry with them some of the older habits that made sense when they were smaller and less focused. One of these habits is the forecast review meeting with not only the whole sales team, but often times the CEO and other people form the organization. As companies grow into expansion, that is one habit that just doesn’t scale.

The forecast review meeting should be a one-on-one meeting between the rep and the manager, but it may be appropriate to invite other people in some cases. In more technical sales, for example, you might invite a sales engineer into the forecast meeting to provide feedback on the technical aspects of the deal, and to confirm the technical win. Often times, as your sales team grows, a very well-trained and trusted resource such as a Sales Engineer can offer valuable insight from the front lines. For instance, they may have additional insight into the deals that they’ve been involved with, or information about new technologies and competitors that you or your reps may be competing with on deals.

However, be cautious not to let any other meeting participants undermine a rep’s forecast. Each rep should own their own forecast, and if they start to feel like you or someone else is setting it for them, you risk losing their trust.

If your organization is already at the size where you have a layer of management between you and your sales reps, such as a sales manager or sales director, you will want them to run their own forecast meetings with their reps. Depending on how many reps each director has, there may be too many deals in the forecast to go through every opportunity. A good approach in that case is to go rep-by-rep, picking on specific deals, especially those in the commit forecast, and the deals that are key to hitting the number. Another good approach if you’re dealing with a high volume of deals is to group similar sized deals together and apply a probability to each group in your adjustments based on feedback from your managers, and historical data.

It’s important to note that even though you want your managers running their own forecast review meetings, you will always have questions that you want unfiltered answers to. As a best practice, it’s good to sit in on at least a handful of forecast review meetings with the manager and the rep every week. This will give you the opportunity to acquire unfiltered feedback from the reps, while also allowing you to see how your managers run their forecast review meetings.

Again, as a general rule of thumb, forecast review meeting participants should be limited. But always keep in mind other resources and people that could help get a deal done. At the end of meetings, you may want to help or advise a sales rep to engage with other members of the organization and ask for their assistance. That’s especially true at early and expansion stage companies, when some prospects may want to speak with a member of the executive team before committing to a deal.