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You've seen it happen before - the sales pipeline was looking great until two weeks before the end of the quarter, then it basically falls off a cliff!  The deals are still there.  Marketing are producing leads.  The sales team are still celebrating new wins and the sales funnel looks healthy.  But it just happened again: dreaded "DEAL SLIPPAGE" means you might not make target this quarter.  

One of the most, if not the most, important aspects of running a successful business is keeping on top of your finances. Small or start-up businesses often need employees to have multiple responsibilities and keeping track of finances can be hard to juggle on top of everything else.

Thankfully there's plenty of tools out there to help with this, making it easier than ever to keep on track. Here's a few suggestions to get you started.

Does your business have a CRM system yet you still find it hard to track and understand sales team performance? Don't worry, you are not alone.

CRM tools such as Salesforce, Pipedrive or HubSpot, are great at capturing sales team activities. Yet, because CRM sales data is fluid, figures can easily be moved between periods and changed retrospectively. This can undermine its integrity and can make is difficult to use CRMs to track team performance effectively. In addition, many service businesses think in terms of reportable monthly revenue, rather than booked contracts and are focused on performance at a client level rather than sales team targets. 

We created QuarterOne to solve these very problems. And here's how it helps you understand and track performance. 

It's a huge day when you win your first big customer contract - and certainly one to celebrate! However, bigger organisations, come with bigger considerations that you need to be aware of.  You should be prepared for dealing with big departments, rather than your original contacts and being presented with a standard terms of business to sign - which is usually non-negotiable.

The news might also come that you won't get paid for 3 months or even longer if you have to do the work first. It's not uncommon for larger customers to insist on 60-120 day payment terms. Sometimes there's nothing you can do but accept the terms, however there are a few things you can do to soften the impact and here they are!

Introducing QuarterOne...

Let’s be honest.  Our idea for QuarterOne started life out of a very common frustration felt by sales and finance teams everywhere.  Having worked together, in senior financial positions, for a couple of amazing businesses, we couldn’t believe there wasn’t a better solution for producing a sales forecast. Every time the CEO said “we need a new revenue forecast for the board”, you could hear the groans from the sales and finance teams a mile away. 

If you've ever managed a small business, no doubt at some point you've been asked to prepare a forecast, normally under the premise that the company's board or investors want to see some updated figures. 

It sounds obvious but a CRM is a key tool for any sales team, in that it can help produce an accurate sales pipeline report, assist in the overall sales process and improve efficiencies in the team.