Best Sales Forecasting Software: Total Visibility, Next-Level Forecasting

Sales managers use forecasting tools to improve the accuracy of their forecast. Because forecasting software shows up-to-date information on each opportunity and uses predictive models to understand your pipeline, it enables sales managers to roll up their pipeline and forecast based on data from their opportunities.

It takes data from your CRM, as well as from customer interactions on calls, emails, and web conferencing, to give a complete view of sales activities against a given sales opportunity. Where it goes beyond your average forecasting template is that it then uses AI to identify deal risks, as well as the probability of closing, to allow managers to forecast based on actual in-pipeline activity. Plus, Gong puts all of these insights into a single dashboard.

For a real-world example, here’s a snapshot of how UberFlip uses Gong to boost forecast accuracy. At the end of each week, their sales leaders finalize a forecast that they can have waiting for the leadership team come Monday morning. Since they use Gong for deal management—including predictions tracked week over week—their forecasting goes pretty smoothly, since they already have a solid idea of the status of the deals that make up their forecast.

The result?

The team does this for months and quarters. Today, they feel they make more accurate forecast calls, as reflected by their increased win rates and ACV.

We find that the best forecasting tools do a combination of three important things:

To choose the best sales forecast tool for your organization, be clear about what you need. For example, do you need up-to-date activity data on active opportunities? Then data collection tools will be the best for you. Of course, you’ll still need to use excel or a similar tool to manipulate the data, which many teams now consider to be too time consuming. 

If you need to filter opportunities by stage and visualize your pipeline, then data visualization tools are your best bet. These tools will plug into sources and generate a view to help you create your forecast.

Finally, if you need to generate a forecast amount, you probably need a data modeling platform. These platforms will crunch the data and create an estimated forecast amount based on historical data and data on active opportunities.

Gong ties activity data from each team member’s calendar, email, and calls with the corresponding opportunities in your CRM. This capability allows you to pull from any field that is attached to an opportunity. You can then use these fields as filters or columns when creating your forecast board, giving you customized views so you can quickly check up on what’s important with the click of a button.

Gong’s AI alerts you on deals that show the following negative signals:

Some Gong users rely on the deal board to automatically inspect their forecast for these signals each and every day. Many sales leaders find that Gong’s proactive alerts help them respond to these negative signals and, in many cases, salvage deals that might have otherwise been lost. 

Gong forecasting software currently integrates with the three leading CRM platforms:

Gong integrates with every tool on your sales team’s tech stack (CRM, dialers, sales engagement software, and more). We offer dozens of integrations across a number of categories, including:

Some of the most popular integrations are Slack, Webex, and Zoom. Click here to view our full list of integrations.

Gong captures and transcribes all that rich data that is created when you communicate with a prospect or customer across call, video conference, and email. Because Gong is continuously compiling and scanning these interactions, you’ll get fresh insights about your pipeline health, forecast, overall performance.

Gong conducts a variety of audits to ensure continuous compliance with industry standard best practices. We recognize that your data is very sensitive. We combine enterprise-grade security features with comprehensive audits of our applications, systems, and networks to ensure customer data is protected. This includes support for identity and access management (with features like single sign-on (SSO), SCIM provisioning and granular data access permissions), as well as enhanced data protections (Gong encrypts data at rest and data in transit for all of our customers). For more information regarding our security and compliance standards, please visit our security page here.