The Power of Value Selling

9Eliminating No‐decision Opportunities and Improving Forecast Accuracy

I want you to meet Jason—he's a manager in the enterprise sales team at an analytics firm whose logo you'd instantly recognize, and he's sitting down with his vice president, Randall, to deliver his sales forecast for the second quarter. Randall looks over Jason's materials, Jason calls his attention to the key data points, and the two men discuss the finer points of a few projections. It's smiles all around, a joke or two, and the already‐confident Jason leaves Randall's office feeling assured that his predictions will manifest into reality.

Now, let's go back in time to the night before this meeting. It's 9:49 p.m., and Jason's sure he's going to be the last to leave the building. Looking around his office, he's confronted with piles of data that are impossible to synthesize into a coherent picture: It's a mess of historical data, opportunities broken down by sales stage, sales cycle length, a complete pipeline analysis, lead scores, lead‐gen projections, and a slew of CRM notes from sales reps that miraculously all say something like, This one is going to close for sure!

Exhausted, overwhelmed, and now doubting the existence of objective truths altogether, he does what he's done every time before—he goes with his gut.

Sound familiar?

Despite sales leaders’ best efforts, most forecasting procedures resemble a blindfolded person throwing darts at the dartboard and seeing what sticks—and this guesswork is ...