Bill K.

Love this question Nikhat I.. Damian O. has it right. It's not about the accuracy. There is feedback between the forecast and the outcome. It's not like forecasting the weather. Accuracy is the wrong goal. All a sales forecast can do is to estimate what will happen if things keep going as they have been going. The value in the forecast then is in quantifying the effects on estimated sales of things you control and that affect the outcome in a positive way. For instance:

Hope this helps.

Yes. What are you interested in Will J.?

Ben C. "building those models can lock your RevOps and planning teams in a spreadsheet bunker for months." Not months. Years. <shameless self-promotion> Theres'a way to do that in five minutes though with our free product. </shameless self-promotion>

Aye. There's the rub Karthiga R.. Backtest the model. But that's only a start. If the objective is to change teh outcome you have to do more. Here's one way to do that. https://www.funnelcast.com/post/the-efficient-frontier-for-sales

Seriously, though. It shouldn't be about who's number is right. I should be about who's model is most useful in showing you what to do—to change the number.

And here I thought we were being honest all along. 😉

Nuno P. "... converting to SQL or opening a new deal within the next 30 days, or something similar." SQL and new deals are usually very different. Nevertheless, you are poking at what is called a time to won model. It is a curve showing the percent that are won (can be converted as well but far less useful) as a function of time since a starting event (opp creation, MQL conversion date, whatever...). We have many blogs on how to do this. Here's one (with examples and a recipe). https://www.funnelcast.com/post/win-rates-are-curves-not-numbers Or you can use our free product. Have fun with this. It's a very robust and powerful way to model demand generation and a sales pipeline. DM me if you want help.