12Forecasts
MUCH OF THE time, your CRM will help you forecast deals about as effectively as tarot cards, a crystal ball, or the entrails of a chicken. You may have a better track record on your March Madness brackets than on trying to forecast your quarter. Predicting what people will do is never easy, which is why some sales leaders describe their pipelines as “pipe lies” that run on “hopium.”
The only way you can confidently forecast your quarter is to win the deals you need before you forecast. Other than that, any deal without a signed contract has a 50-50 chance of being won. You can argue all you want about sales math, but I assure you there are only two outcomes: winning and losing.
A Misunderstanding of Sales Math
When you install a CRM, let's say Salesforce.com, the preset percentages aligned with each stage of a deal suggest your likelihood of winning that opportunity. The first stage in Salesforce's template is titled “Prospecting” and it shows the percentage as 10 percent. Unless your team wins 10 out of every 100 records in your CRM, there is no evidence to suggest you have any chance of winning a prospect's business before you have ever communicated with them.
The second stage is “Qualification,” which Salesforce also gives 10 percent odds of winning. Following this senseless logic, you have the same chance of winning a deal with qualified as with unqualified prospects—it claims that qualifying someone literally does nothing to improve your results. Just doing ...
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