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People love certainty, especially when it comes to business. Which is why sales forecasting and sales pipeline management can often be the bane of sales leaders and their sales teams’ lives with senior management constantly on their backs wanting to know what deals will land and when, and when the revenue will start to come in. It’s relentless.

So given the current state of the world and the climate of uncertainty, it’s a good time to look at some of the latest thinking and work being done to improve the certainty of sales forecasting and pipeline management.

Current Situation with Sales Forecasting

Tracking sales performance can currently be done on over 7,000 apps. However, where sales forecasts on these platforms are possible, they can be onerous and cumbersome for the front line to operate while delivering unreliable information too late to make good decisions.

Crowdsourcing – A Different Approach

Crowdsourcing intelligence can deliver a whole new perspective to sales by improving the speed and accuracy of forecasting allowing sales leaders to take immediate action on shifts and turns in their markets, clients and competitors.

By using Crowdsourcing Sales Forecasting sales leaders and senior management are able to:

  • Forecast easier faster
  • Speed up business decisions and reaction time by providing more certainty
  • Spot opportunities and issues more quickly to take immediate action
  • Enable senior managers to report more accurately, as well as;
  • Anticipate and report “blindside” events better, faster; and
  • Capture real time insights/data that are often missed in CRMs and reports

Tapping into Human Networks and Gamification

By using crowdsourcing gamification technology businesses can tap into human networks across their whole business, not just salespeople. With the right technology, this wisdom of the crowd can give insights and forecasts on sales drivers such as the likelihood of reaching a quarterly target, the success of a new product launch or the shifts in a clients’ priorities.

Harnessing Crowd Intelligence & Prediction Markets

To harness crowd intelligence in sales management, Barrett Consulting Group now provides a proprietary forecasting platform. This is a powerful crowdsourcing technology which produces crowd views on the likelihood for sales events such as sales volumes, contracts won/lost/on hold and all key items of interest.

A classic proof of crowd intelligence is the “jelly-beans experiment”, in which the group’s estimate of the number of beans in the jar is invariably superior to the majority of the individual guesses. When finance professor Jack Treynor ran the experiment in his class with a jar that held 850 beans, the group estimate was 871. Only one of the fifty-six people in the class made a better guess. 

Not just jellybeans. Crowdsourcing is being used extensively in areas such as geopolitics, hedge funds, government planning, security, etc.

Predication markets have already become exchanges trading in the outcome of events.

Harness the Collective Intelligence across Your Business

The same applies to organisations and sales. Any individual in an organisation can predict events and outcomes, no matter what level of traditional expertise they have. Forecasters make predictions based on real information, their personal insights into what the business and their customers are doing, or simply on a hunch, whether they are an expert or not. For example, a conversation overheard, an observation on a customer site, or other insights put together in the right context will potentially affect the organisation.

Channel Insights to Quickly Adapt to Changes and Opportunities

All insights lead to a level of probability that can be accessed at any time during the forecasting process. If the predictions shift towards 100% it means the crowd thinks the event is almost certain to happen. Zero percent means that crowd thinks it is almost impossible. Any sudden shifts in the crowd opinion are early indicators for potential change that can be investigated in a timely manner.

By being able to channel those insights into forecasts, the “collective intelligence” of the crowd can become a powerful tool to learn where an organisation is heading, and understand what influences those movements and changes. At the same time, people with crowd-contradicting insights will be rewarded for the accuracy of their forecasts by the platforms’ proprietary algorithms. This can help an organisation identify unconventional factors and sources affecting their business.

Customer Centric Alignment and Engagement across Your Business

This process isn’t just for salespeople, it’s for everyone in your business. Everyone can have a say in how they think the organisation is progressing. Everyone can participate in predicting and channelling opportunities but only the most accurate will be rewarded.

How does it work?

Crowdsourcing Sales Forecasting brought to you by Barrett & Dysruptlabs is:

  • App based proprietary forecasting platform
  • Easy to set up and completely separate from internal IT systems/software, so no integration required
  • Forecasting Competitions – Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and/or Yearly
  • Weekly, monthly and quarterly reports for managers on forecasting trends, opportunities, issues and insights
  • Customised competitions and reward programs
  • Anonymous league tables for data accuracy and transparency
  • Gamification model
  • Standalone platform or works in concert with an organisation’s current sales forecasting and /or big data and AI/Machine Learning plans
  • Unique to Barrett

The Time is NOW

The time is NOW to tap into the wisdom of the crowd that carries your organisation through fast-paced changing times, better.

If you’re curious to learn more, let’s make a time talk about Crowdsourcing Sales Forecasting for your business in 2020.

please contact us or phone 03 9533 0000 to make a time to meet and discuss further.

Here’s to Selling Better.

Remember, everybody lives by selling something