Sales & Revenue Forecasting with Rahul Shah

Rahul Shah is the Chief Executive Officer of ForecastEra. Shah has more than 15 years of experience as an accomplished CFO and COO. He founded the company in 2016 and leads the overall corporate direction and strategy at ForecastEra. He has an extensive background in financial planning, sales analytics, and operational management. Prior to ForecastEra, Shah served as the CFO for Global Industry Verticals, a DXC Technology company, managing an $8B+ P&L at CSC and was also responsible for setting up a Global COE for Revenue and Sales Analytics. He’s held other leadership positions at Covansys, Infosys, and PwC.

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Rahul:

Looking at it from an organizational lens instead of a siloed lens is what I would say is number one.

Brett:

What is the number one secret to, you know, proper sales and revenue forecasting?

Rahul:

So I would say it’s, it’s getting the data underlying data correct. So at least, what I find is a lot of companies have data silos between sales and finance. Getting that aligned in then, with a plethora of tools out there, including AI, how do you accurately forecast revenues, you know, across and look at it from an organizational lens instead of a siloed one? Lens? is kind of what I would say is the number one secret.

Brett:

Okay, so the number one secret is getting the underlining data correct and then looking at it from, like, a bigger macro organizational instead of for summary, for the first secret? Absolutely. Excellent. What’s the number two secret?

Rahul:

The number two secret I would say is, is having the mindset and collaboration between the various stakeholders because more often than not, I see that, you know, people are doing their own thing in their silos. So getting that culture of collaboration within the company is very important to ensure you get an accurate forecast.

Brett:

Next, so it’s mindset and collaboration. So making sure these key stakeholders in different sales or marketing or accounting, or different departments, are all of the same mindset are collaborating and communicating. Is that a fair summary? Yes, absolutely. Okay, we’re moving quickly. What about number three?

Rahul:

Number three, I would say, is making sure that you know there are tools and processes in the company that is set up to kind of get all of this data in one place. Because, again, what I’ve seen is if you’re trying to do this, predominantly I’ve seen done on spreadsheets or Google Sheets, that data is always going to be, you know, yesterday’s news, because somebody’s changed it since you last looked at it and it’s not real-time. So getting it real-time in a tool and putting a cohesive process around that is important.

Brett:

Okay, so tools and processes set up, get it all set up, where it’s producing in real-time, the data, and then we can also process and make decisions on that. Is that a fair summary?