I’ll bet that if you ask most CEOs and sales VPs they can list at least a dozen ways in which their organizations are doing a better job now
than they were in past years: improvements by using scientific, personality fitness assessment tools means much smarter hiring and impressively reducing sales-rep turnover, more customer-nurturing focused processes and best-practice policies means no one ever falls through the cracks again, exciting new technology platforms means stronger sales-and-marketing alignment, and so on.

But if execs are speaking frankly, most will also acknowledge there is one area where neither is making much progress:

Sales Forecasting.

And it is making things progressively muddier.

Many have installed CRMs, established sometimes quite elaborate selling processes, and invested substantially in the latest thing in
sales skills training, but are still unable to consistently deliver forecasts that senior management can feel confident about.

Forecast accuracy depends on pipeline predictability, and pipeline predictability is tough. So how does revenue get lost
in the pipeline? Some the ways:

1. Deal closing slippage―the opportunity moves back to an earlier stage in the pipeline.
2. Stalled deal― the opportunity doesn’t move back, but it doesn’t move forward either.
3. Wrong stage― the sales rep has misread the buying signals or mishandled, appropriate follow-up.
4. Incorrect revenue amounts―the rep thinks (hopes) the deal is worth much more than it really is.
5. Unrealistic timelines―progress is being made, but way more slowly than anyone on the sales side expected.

All these problems stem from a single source: the necessarily highly subjective view of the sales rep.
In any of the software, or software-as-a-service CRMs, it’s the sales rep who makes the decisions about what data to
enter―pipeline stage, revenue estimates, everything.

Even the best salespeople―often especially the best salespeople―want to believe that the deal is bigger, more solid
and much faster-closing than the facts might suggest.
But what exactly are the facts? Where exactly are the facts?
Newer CRM and upgraded versions, euphemistically called CRM 2.0 offer most of the answers to effective and dependable
sales prognostications and radically reduces dependence on crystal-balls.

Good Nurturing

Jim