5 Metrics for Your Workweek – Tuesday: Sales Forecast
Welcome to a new Bullhorn Blog series entitled “5 Metrics for Your Workweek.” InsightSquared and Bullhorn are teaming up to get you more involved and engaged with your data. Read a new business intelligence metric tip each day and learn how running your recruiting business by the numbers can help drive success.
Monday’s metric was all about examining the Job Orders in your pipeline. Tuesday’s is even better: it’s about showing you the money. Specifically, the expected revenue from your bookings, sliced by employee. Today your daily dose of data will be Sales Forecasting. Insert cash register noise here. Especially at the beginning of the year, knowing how much revenue your employees are expected to bring in each month is important. Not only does this help you estimate whether your business is on pace to break last year’s revenue benchmarks, but it’s also a good real-time indicator of the health of your pipeline. It reveals action items: if the Sales Forecast is weak, you need to spend more energy generating leads. If it’s strong, then you can shift your focus to making sure each and every Placement gets made. Recruiting firms that don’t keep an eye on their forecast run into situations where they are blindsided by revenue gaps. We often see a cyclical effect in many staffing firms with high and low months – this is often blamed on seasonality, but in reality it is often as a result of cyclical behavior of reps, months of hard core cold calling, followed by months with less calls and more action on getting candidates into the jobs. In the end, firms are left scrambling for answers, and nearly all of the time, it’s too late to do anything about it. Knowing your Sales Forecast months in advance gives you time to take action on an upcoming weaker month, so that they might not be so weak after all. This predictability in your revenue stream can stabilize your sales team and help them see the big picture. Knowing your Sales Forecast by employee will also show you:
- An estimate of when you can expect certain revenue to come in.
- A percentage of what deals are and are not expected to close.
- Which employees will have a strong and consistent January, February, or March and beyond.
How to Calculate: Sales Forecasting is a pretty tough thing to calculate correctly. You can read InsightSquared’s primer on this topic to get a general sense of the various methods. At the end of the day, revenue matters. Your employees’ commissions are based on it, as well as the health of your company. Looking at the Sales Forecast each week will help you understand how much each employee is expected to contribute to the bottom line in the coming months, giving you solid numbers behind one-on-one performance and coaching conversations. Want an easier way to pull this metric? Ask your Bullhorn rep about InsightSquared today!
About the Author
Robert Woo is the Marketing Manager at InsightSquared. You can read more of his analytic entries at InsightSquared.com.
