The CRO Forecast Review Dashboard has been created and configured for you right out of the box, so your CRO and their direct reports have a built-in dashboard based on best practices, utilizing your data.

About the CRO Forecast Review Dashboard

What data is included? Opportunities, Forecast Submissions

Who should use it? CROs and their direct reports

When to use it? Weekly for sales cycles under 90 days, bi-weekly to monthly for sales cycles over 90 days

Why use it?

• Review your forecast and changes to the forecast to ensure you are on track to hit your number for the fiscal period (month or quarter).

• Ensure that there is visibility to risk in the plan.

• Visualize the health of the forecast for and with your board.

• Verify that first-line managers and leadership are aligned on what needs to happen to make a plan.

Deployment Considerations and Best Practices

• Know what period the client is operating on (i.e. Quarterly or Monthly): The cards below here are for the quarterly version, even though there are some monthly cards shown as well. This ensures the best visibility into your forecast.

• Know how far in the future the customer forecasts: This will be useful for correct filtering of your Forecast Submission card.

• Know their average sales cycle and ACV (long sales cycles vs. short, small deals vs large): Based on this, you can better advise review cadence

• Know what the primary Opportunity Types are (i.e. Record Type, ELP Opps that are auto-generated) that are forecasted (segments): The default dashboard will not have Type filters, but it is possible they’ll want to filter to forecast on specific types (ex. just looking at forecasting for New Business)

• Know what the primary Opp value is (i.e. MRR, ACV, TCV, ARR)

Usage by Persona

For Sales Leaders with First Line Managers

When: Weekly ( < 90 day sales cycles), Monthly ( > 90 day sales cycles)

How: Review bookings and current pipeline with first-line managers to track progress towards goals. Discuss the plan to make up any gaps and address concerns about at-risk opportunities leveraging inflection points and AI support to identify the best areas to put time into

For Sales Leaders

When: Every few days, Ad-hoc

How: Check progress towards commitments made in 1:1s.

Pre-req Training

Placeholder / Copying and Editing Cards

This dashboard contains some placeholder cards, click here to learn how to replace these cards with your own data.

You may decide you want additional cards similar to what's provided, check out this article on copying and editing cards to learn how you can copy and adjust a current card instead of starting from scratch!

The CRO Forecast Review Dashboard

The following rows and cards make up the template of reports we consider best practice for a CRO Forecast Review Dashboard. Each card can be opened with one click to further inspect data with a more focused view on a particular report.

We recommend having your CRO Forecast Review dashboard open in another window as you walk through this guide.

Row 1: Where am I so far in my quarter? What do I have left to try and close?

▪︎ Closed Won this Month (Headline)

▪︎ Total Pipeline this Month (Headline)

▪︎ Closed Won this Quarter (Headline)

▪︎ Total Pipeline this Quarter (Headline)

▪︎ Commit + Best Case this Quarter (Headline)

▪︎ Pipeline {Forecast Category} this Quarter (Headline)

Row 2: Am I on track to hit my goal for this quarter?

▪︎ This Quarter {Segment Name} Bookings vs Goals (Bar Chart with Goals)

▪︎ This Quarter {Segment Name} Bookings vs Goals (Bar Chart with Goals)

This card(s) will come out of the box as a Placeholder Card, which means we prepare a place in the dashboard for a card(s) that needs to be customized to your business process or data. In this case, a Bar Chart with Goals is the best practice recommendation for this spot. Goals don't make sense provided out of the box since they are so specific to each organization. But never fear, we've made creating goals easy, check out this article if you haven't already created your own goals! You must create goals before creating a goals card!

Once you have a goal(s) created, create a Bar Chart card with Goals. (Create a new card and use the Generic Goal Insight template.) In this case, we're looking at the Bookings Goal for New Business for the Quarter. You can see this goal configuration below.

Pro tip: If you're creating goal cards for multiple segments, create the first card, then copy and adjust the name of the card and segment selection for the next segment instead of starting a new card from scratch! For example, after creating the goal card above, we would copy the card and change both the title and segment selection to Renewal rather than New Business, and so on for each segment. (Typically there are no more than 3 segments.)

Row 3: Does my team think I will hit my goal? Does the AI?

▪︎ This Month Forecast by Type (Bar Chart)

▪︎ Predicted Current Quarter Forecast by Forecast Category (Bar Chart)

Row 4: Are my bookings trending the way I expect? Are there any red flags (i.e. too much targeted for last day of fiscal)?

▪︎ Current Quarter Bookings Trajectory (Bar Chart)

▪︎ Current Month Bookings Trajectory (Bar Chart)

Row 5: What can I expect to close this quarter? Is that enough?

▪︎ Closing this Week (Top Content List)

▪︎ Commit at Risk this Quarter (Top Content List)

▪︎ Low Confidence Upside this Quarter (Top Content List)

▪︎ Potential Pull Ins (Top Content List)

Pro tip: See a card that's almost perfect for your needs but could use a tweak to best fit your process? Cards are customizable and can be edited, or copied and adjusted for a similar card so you don't have to start from scratch.

How did we build this dashboard template for you?

The CRO Forecast Review Dashboard has been created for you out of the box using the configurations listed below. We love being able to provide this Dashboard out of the box and ready to use, but it's always good to know what data you're working with when you hit the ground running.

Dashboard Configuration

• Base Template - Generic Multi-Content Insight Board

• Content Type - Opportunities, Forecast Submissions

• Filters - Hierarchy

Filters on Report Drills

Clicking on a card will produce an inspection report so you can drill down on a card's specific data. Each report comes with our recommended best practice filter sets (report columns) that can be customized to best fit your process. Read Interactive Filters to learn more!

If you run into any issues, please contact support.