[Zoho CRM] Strategy Influencer Now Integrated with Forecasts

[Zoho CRM] Strategy Influencer Now Integrated with Forecasts

Zoho had earlier mentioned during the launch of their Strategy Influencer feature that they would be enhancing forecasts by integrating Strategy Influencer with it. They are glad to announce that this integration is now available in Zoho CRM. You can now leverage the various analytics provided by the Strategy Influencer feature for forecasts that you create in your Zoho CRM account. This provides you with detailed target predictions and helps you create more refined forecasts.

Forecasts in Zoho CRM - Overview 

Forecasts in Zoho CRM enables you to predict future sales, set appropriate targets, and monitor sales progress, using past sales data. You can create forecasts for a month or a quarter. 

These sales forecasts provide you with valuable insights to plan your upcoming activities based on the target achieved by individual team members.

Strategy Influencer in Zoho CRM - Overview

The Strategy Influencer feature in Zoho CRM consists of various analytics on the overall organizational trends and patterns. It offers you insights such as predicted targets, anomalies, reasons for targets not achieved, and solutions to achieve targets. Using these insights, you can understand your overall business performance and devise optimal strategies to enhance it.
 

Why Strategy Influencer in Forecasts?

The very purpose of creating forecasts is to predict revenues and assign realistic and productive targets to your reps. To achieve an effective forecast, there are various factors to be considered to know the relevant impacts before progressing further.
 
Having essential metrics can help you analyze your business better, and hence you can identify the impacting factors better. This results in more accurate forecasts and better planning of your organizational goals.
 
The Strategy Influencer feature, with its various organizational analytics, aids you in creating the most optimal forecasts for your business. Let's see how it does this.

Strategy Influencer in Forecasts 

When a Strategy Influencer analysis is created for a forecast, the analysis will be based on the forecast's target. The analytics and time filters in the Strategy Influencer would be based on the forecast period, whether it's a monthly or quarterly forecast.
 
The Strategy Influencer in forecasts provides you with insights in the form of 5 components namely :
 
  • Target Contributors
  • Anomaly Finder
  • Gap Analyzer
  • Predictor
  • Prescriptor

Target Contributors 

The Target Contributors component displays the individual contributing factors that impact the overall target to be achieved. It also has details of individual contributing factors such as the expected target, the actual target achieved, and trend icons that depict the impact of the contributing factor.



You can edit the targets provided in the target contributor component as per your business needs. When you edit the overall target in the strategy influencer, you can check the updated target values of the individual contributing factors in the Target Contributors component. You can make this updated overall target in the Strategy Influencer as your forecast target if needed.

Anomaly Finder

The Anomaly Finder analyses if there are anomalies in the achieved value and details the reasons for the anomalies, the expected and the achieved targets, and the impact amount on the target, for the selected time period.



Gap Analyzer  

The Gap Analyzer identifies any gaps between the predicted and actual value, that happened on a particular day or a week and the reasons that led to the gaps.



Predictor

The Predictor component displays the predicted and achieved targets for the top-contributing picklist and lookup field values identified by Zia and the impact during different time duration.



Prescriptor

The Prescriptor component tell you how you can achieve a predicted target, and also how to rectify a missed target to achieve it moving forward.



Retraining and Deleting Forecasts

Apart from these components, you can also retrain the Strategy Influencer once every 15 days as required.

In the case of deleting a Strategy Influencer analysis in a forecast, the delete option will be available only when it is possible to recreate Strategy Influencer for another forecast with a different target metric.



Feature Specifications

  • Insights from Strategy Influencer will be available for forecasts on All Deals.
  • Insights from Strategy Influencer for the forecast is only visible to Admins.
  • Strategy Influencer insights are available only for the current ongoing forecasts.
  • Strategy Influencer in Forecasts is available for 20+ user accounts in Enterprise and Ultimate editions.
  • This feature is available only for English language users. The super admin and other admin users need to be English users.