1. Deal Hygiene

Are deals up to date?

The Opportunity Table enables you to review each opportunity and make sure the Stage, Amount, Close Date and Next Step are all updated. Simply click on the pencil icon to make any changes. Even better, with inline editing , any change you make will be automatically updated in your CRM too.

We recommend you repeat this process daily to keep on top of your opportunities.

2. Deal Inspection

a. Which deals have trended negatively or remained idle?

Which deals have progressed? And which deals haven’t? The Opportunity Trend Flowchart shows just this. 

Select Trend Down or Idle to find out what opportunities these are. It will also display which forecast categories these opportunities are in. Pay particular attention if you have deals in Commit that are trending negatively as this could affect your forecasting accuracy. 

Scroll down to inspect the Opportunity Table and see the reasons why these deals are idle or trending down. Make a plan of the next steps for these opportunities to get them back on track.

b. Which deals are at risk?

Identifying deals that are at risk early is essential to ensuring they are not lost. 

Use the Ebsta Insights bar to show Opportunities to Prioritize. 

This helps you identify and prioritize those deals within your pipeline that need attention. For example, those with no scheduled future Activity, those where there has been no activity in last 14 days, those that have spent too long in their current stage compared to average and so on. 

From here you can select the opportunities you would like to view by clicking view opportunities.

This will populate the Opportunity Horizon Chart. This displays Opportunities in the pipeline as bubbles and plots them against Engagement Score and expected Close Date.  The size of the bubble represents the deal value. 

Now that you have visibility of the opportunities you can use the Opportunity Table below to get a deeper understanding of their specifics. With visibility of these opportunities you can now plan the next steps.

c. Why will we win this deal? How do we plan to close this deal?

Ebsta provides you with the insights you need to carry out comprehensive deal reviews. Scroll down to the Opportunity Table to give you immediate visibility into every opportunity and a lowdown on the Engagement Score, Deal Score and any warnings on the opportunity.

We have developed a Deal Qualification Guide that will demonstrate if you have all of the necessary criteria to close the deal, or if there are important areas you are neglecting.

This helps you identify what the trigger to close is, who you need to influence and who the key players are.

3. Forecast Validation

What will the commit and upside be?

After you have reviewed your opportunities you can decide based upon the data what your commit, upside and best case forecast submission will be.

Click Submit Forecast from the top right hand corner. This will open the Forecast Submission Tab on the right hand side of the console.

Scroll down to the Opportunity Table. You may have noticed that there is a Manual Forecast Toggle on every opportunity – using this toggle you can select whether you think that opportunity is Pipeline (P), Upside (U) or Commit (C).

When you have gone through all of your opportunities these will be totalled in the Forecast Submission Tab. 

Check that these figures make sense to you. Click the figure in Total Amount to copy this figure to My Forecast- you can edit if necessary. Add any supporting notes and finally submit your forecast using the blue Submit button.