Wishlist Corporation, a Britehouse Group company focused on identifying and closing functionality gaps in enterprise systems and thereby improving performance for its customers, has introduced an accurate sales and opportunity forecasting application (SOFA).
The application ensures a sustainable pipeline across multiple business units - having the potential to increase sales for any organisation by up to 400% - and enables organisations to accurately predict growth.
Available as either a hosted cloud or on-premise option, Wishlist SOFA is built on Microsoft Dynamic CRM, enabling large and medium sized organisations already using that platform to simply add SOFA functionality rather than having to integrate a free standing application. For organisations not currently using Microsoft Dynamic CRM, the solution provides a stable, proven platform from which to automate sales and opportunity forecasting.
"Operating within the Britehouse Group, which provides enterprise solutions based on both Microsoft and SAP, gives us an extremely good view of what's missing from the functionality offered by such systems," says Wishlist joint MD, Neville Levinthal.
"Our observations showed that, while companies' ERP systems enable accurate financial forecasting, they don't provide insight into sales activity at individual customer account level. And, while CRM systems automate much of the sales process, including capturing leads and opportunities, there is no comprehensive set of tools working from a central database that can accurately forecast revenue from closed or potential deals.
"This creates additional problems in terms of having no objective means to improve sales, because there is no information on which to base a change of sales or marketing focus or the motivation or incentivisation of sales staff."
In most organisations, sales people use spreadsheets to do their forecasting. This means there is no single source of information for the organisation as a whole, or for local or regional sales managers.
"Specifically, until SOFA, there has been no coherent way of forecasting annuity revenue across complex deals that incorporate multiple product lines," Levinthal says. "For instance, an insurance broker has no means of accurately forecasting sales or commissions of each of a householders, car and business insurance policy to a single customer, let alone across several customers. It's also extremely difficult to forecast the revenue for multiple product lines across multiple customers across multiple periods.
"SOFA not only enables accurate predictions in such cases but, using rules and roles, enables individual account data to be rolled up from sales person level all the way to the executive suite."
Dashboards present monthly forecasts on any device of their choosing to those with the relevant authorisation.
Levinthal says that Wishlist SOFA will bolster growth in any organisation but would be especially beneficial in enterprises that need to predict revenue from high volumes of relatively small deals based on annuity income.
"It's the ideal solution for service providers, such as telcos, financial services organisations, and cloud providers, as well as for businesses where product sales are related or tied to services. Car dealerships that add value to their vehicle sales via contracts for warranties, insurance, and roadside and domestic emergency assist programmes would be a case in point."
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