As a Nor'Easter barreled across Central Massachusetts today, a few interesting storm-related happenings were analogous to some sales-related occurrences. This article will explore two weather-related analogies:

1. It's in 3D - Dinger the Dog and his choice of Doors
2. The Magic of Weather Apps

I've written about Dinger, our six-year-old Golden Doodle, several times.  The most popular article was when I claimed and proved that Dinger's listening skills were better than those of salespeople. 

At the onset of the storm Dinger went out to do his business and got soaked.  When he's ready to come back into the house, he usually looks in the windows to see which room we are in, and whether that's in the front of the house or the back of the house he goes to a front or back door and knocks just like we do.  Knock-knock-knock. He knew he was soaked so he went to the side door, which opens into a room with a tile floor, where we dry him with a towel.  A new trick - he knew which door to use based on the weather!

Dinger is smarter than so many salespeople who regularly use the wrong doors.   Some salespeople use the back door which leads to the warehouse.  Others use the front door which leads directly to reception and procurement.  Some use the side door which brings them to business users and middle management.  But the best salespeople, the top 10%, use the private entrance which leads to the C Suite.  If you had to rank the doors in order of importance, regardless of what you are selling, it would be:

1. The Private Entrance - this is where decisions - about everything - are made.  Worst case, you get a top-down introduction to someone who deals with what you sell.  I remember the first time that happened to me around 40 years ago.  The CEO, who I didn't know, introduced me to the VP Sales, who I didn't know.  I wasn't very impressive and was really young but that Sales VP felt pressured to do business with me by what he perceived to be a strong relationship between me and the CEO.  Which is easier and more powerful - fighting your way up or getting introduced on your way down?
2. The Warehouse - There are only two reasons to enter the warehouse.  Either you are looking for door number 2 - the entrance to the Plant Manger's office, or you are talking with people working in the plant to identify issues that you can use in a meeting with the VP of Manufacturing or the VP of Engineering after the CEO introduces them to you.
3. The Side Door - I can't think of a good reason to enter through the side door because users and middle managers don't have the authority to say anything except, "looks good," "we'll let you know," and "No."
4. The Front Entrance - The only thing worse than the side door is the door that delivers you to the official gatekeepers of the kingdom and of course, procurement.  If you are selling the right way, you might end up in procurement to formalize terms, and get sign-off on a Purchase Order. You must never begin in Procurement unless you simply offer no value, have the lowest price, and are selling large quantities of a low priced product. When people write about the death of selling, that's really a phrase about where salespeople go to die.  Procurement.

47% of salespeople reach decision makers but 90% of the best salespeople reach decision makers while only 5% of the worst salespeople reach decision makers.  Do you think there is a correlation?  What about causation?  Damn straight.

The storm caused me to regularly check the weather apps.  Apps plural because for some reason, despite having access to the exact same data, they all predict something completely different.  My four apps of choice were:

1. Accuweather  predicted 12-18 inches of snow
2. Weather.com  predicted 4-8 inches of snow
3. Apple Weather (formerly Dark Sky) predicted an inch of mixed precipitation
4. Fox Weather predicted 2 inches of rain and sleet.

Post Storm Note: We received 3 inches of snow so Weather.com came the closest - this time.

Could four forecasts be more different and confusing?  Forecasting winter weather in New England is tricky and the difference between rain, snow, ice and mixed precipitation can sometimes come down to the center of the storm tracking a few more miles east or west of the original storm track.

Weather forecasts are the same as forecasting a sale. 

There is your personal sales forecast, which by nature will be overly optimistic as you'll have it closing sooner than it actually will, and for more money than you'll actually get.  But lost in your forecast are the forecasts from your three competitors.  They too will forecast a win and unlike the weather apps, which all have the potential to get the forecast correct, only one of your forecasts will be accurate.  Only one of four can win - a 25% chance of being right. 

And you're going to win this because why?  They like you better?  You have a strong relationship?  You have a better product?  You have a better price?  You have faster delivery?  You have a better reputation?  You have better references?  You've been around longer?  Your quality is better?

Who cares about that stuff other than you?  If those were truly the difference makers you would win every deal, every single time.  But you don't win every deal, do you? 

The question isn't "why not?"  The question is why are your forecasts wrong?

Most of the time, sales forecasts fail to take into consideration the following:

• If the salesperson entered through the correct door - are they talking with THE decision maker as opposed to A decision maker or influencer?
• Was there a compelling reason for the prospect to take action and is there a compelling reason to buy from you instead of the competition?
• Was the salesperson effective enough selling value so that the prospect will spend more to buy from you?
• Was the opportunity thoroughly qualified?

While 28% of salespeople are strong qualifiers, 77% of the best salespeople are strong qualifiers and 0% of the worst salespeople are strong qualifiers.  ZERO!  Do you think there is a correlation?  What about causation? 

Think like Dinger, use four weather apps, become a strong consultative seller and a strong qualifier, and your sales effectiveness will improve drastically!

One hundred years ago, most men and women wore hats and dressed up to go everywhere. Sixty years later, Dress for Success was founded and at the same time became somewhat of a thing where if you wanted to be successful, you needed to dress like you were successful.  That was followed by business casual Fridays and then always business casual. Finally, the tech industry ushered in the current movement for business dress, the "who cares?" dress code.  The pandemic changed everything so that "who cares?" temporarily became whatever you were wearing when you woke up this morning!

Times change but one constant is the requirement for monthly, quarterly and annual sales forecasts.  It used to be difficult to come up with that number but with the technology we have today, a single click in our CRM applications should show us the accurate number.  But there is always a lingering question that accompanies that click:  Is that really the accurate number?

Most sales leaders have to perform major tweaks to that number because the opportunities in the CRM aren't up to date, the opportunities don't contain all the information, and the probabilities and dates are likely over stated.  But despite playing with the data, the sales leaders's attempt to settle on a single, more realistic number will usually be incorrect. In my experience, there are three distinct types of CEO reactions to this constant epidemic of missed forecasts:

1. The revenue is fine and the margins are high regardless as to whether the team does or doesn't hit the forecast number and they simply don't care.  They are in the minority but they are definitely out there.
2. Some CEOs have become so numb to this monthly ritual that the likelihood of an inaccurate forecast has been baked into their operation.  They expect it to be wrong.
3. Finally there is the third group. They become more and more pissed off with every blown forecast and don't understand why it continues to occur or what to do about it. 

Watch this 3 minute rant from me to hear what I believe is to blame.

I feel better now that I got that off my chest...

Here are 10 steps to put an end to missed forecasts:

1. CRM - Cut your losses and move to a salesperson-friendly CRM so that your salespeople will use it and keep it updated. If they see it as a tool to help them sell rather than a replacement for call reports you'll have realtime data and isn't that the primary executive function for CRM?  I recommend Membrain.
2. Sales Process - Have your trusted sales consultancy customize and optimize your sales process.
3. Tools - Have your trusted sales consultancy build a predictive scorecard and simple playbooks. 
4. Integration - integrate the sales process, scorecard and playbook into your CRM.  It should all be working together inside your CRM.
5. Training - Train your salespeople on how THEY can get the most out of THEIR CRM application and share your expectations as to daily use.
6. Accountability - Hold salespeople accountable for keeping it updated daily. It's a condition for continued employment, or for releasing their commissions, or for expense reimbursement but under no circumstances is it optional.
7. Evaluation - Ask your sales consultancy to have your sales team evaluated in all 21 Sales Core Competencies so that you can identify capabilities and gaps and weaknesses and get them fixed.
8. Training - Get comprehensive training for your sales managers on how to effectively conduct opportunity reviews and coach up your salespeople.  Isn't that one of the primary sales management purposes for CRM?  
9. Training - Have your sales training company provide comprehensive sales training in all the areas identified in the sales team evaluation.
10. Annual Review, tweak and repeat.

Ready to get started?  Let's go!

There has been much talk in the news about forecasts - and while most have been wrong they are still more accurate than Fortune Cookies!

Thanks to satellites, computer modeling and doppler radar, weather forecasts are more reliable than ever before.  Yet despite those advances, they are still guessing - educated guesses to be sure - but guessing about what will happen, when it will happen, and where it will happen.  I live in central Massachusetts and between late November and early April, most winter storms track up the east coast and when a storm tracks a few miles east, west or south of the New England coastline it determines whether it will bring, rain, snow, ice or a combination, and if mostly snow, how much snow to a given city or town.  They get it right - a lot - but they get it wrong often enough too.

We have also seen 19 months of COVID-19 case, hospitalization and fatality predictions which have been totally and consistently wrong.  Two weeks to stop the spread has turned into vaccine and mask mandates that show no sign of going away, especially when they treat each new variant like the pandemic is starting anew.  

We get economic forecasts, employment forecasts, and of course the most famous of all forecasts during October, political polling.  We know the polls are are always off by enough points to get the results wrong.

With all of these forecasts having the chance to be completely wrong, it makes me wonder about the way sales leaders and CEOs react to sales forecasts.  After all, should we expect anything different when it comes to sales?

For the longest time, sales forecasts were expected to be wrong because the salespeople themselves were the ones making the predictions.  That's like us predicting the weather.  "Oh, we're scheduled to go to the beach tomorrow so it has to be nice outside."  It's the equivalent of, "I've had some great conversations and I need one more deal to come in this quarter so it's looking good!"

Then, CRM's began to include calculated predictions to make the forecasts more accurate.  The calculations were based on how much of the sales process had been covered to date instead of how a sales rep felt.  It was supposed to improve the accuracy of the forecasts but it didn't because the percentage of sales stages completed is only as good as the sales process itself. To this day, most of the sales processes I review are missing entire stages, missing key milestones, or sequenced so poorly that they aren't really processes at all but are more like a bunch of loosely connected ideas about selling.  

I have personally reviewed hundreds of sales processes and Objective Management Group (OMG) has evaluated the sales teams of more than two million salespeople.  From that experience, I can tell you a few things with authority:

Overall, only 33% of all salespeople have the competency Sales Process as a strength or, if we flip that around, 67% have it as a weakness for all the reasons I mentioned in the paragraph above.  The good news is that 83% of the best salespeople in the world have it as a strength while only 6% of the weakest salespeople in the world have it as a strength.  The best salespeople are 1383% more likely to have sales process as a strength!

Related to that, but even more problematic, is CRM.  OMG has a sales competency called Sales Technology and CRM is the primary component of that.  Only 18% of all salespeople have it as a strength, 51% of the best salespeople have it as a strength, and only 4% of the weakest Salespeople have it as a strength.  Even though the scores are worse than for Sales Process, the best salespeople are still 1275% more likely to have it as a strength.

THE SINGLE THING that has the highest predictive accuracy is a properly built sales scorecard.  Not a marketing scorecard where you score how close an opportunity is to your sweet spot, but a scorecard that objectively - not subjectively - scores the opportunity itself based on six to seven very specific conditions.  While the conditions are different for every company and can vary by sales team or offering within a company, they can usually be selected from a group of no more than thirty-five possible conditions.  Then they must be prioritized, weighted and tested before being rolled out to the sales team.

But even after building it, I still see companies with inaccurate forecasts because of their inconsistent use of the scorecard.  Unless the scorecard becomes a required milestone in the qualification stage of the sales process, nothing will change.  Each opportunity must achieve a minimum score in order for a salesperson to proceed to a formal quotation or proposal and if it doesn't achieve that score, the opportunity should not be pursued.  That is a tall order for salespeople, frontline sales managers, and their sales leaders.  And when an opportunity does meet the required minimum score, it should be pursued with all available resources because that opportunity is winnable.

There is a time-tested and successful process for building a predictive sales scorecard and its success transcends industries, offerings, territories, audiences and verticals.  The question is, will you ask for help in getting a scorecard built, or will your forecasts continue to be as inconsistent as pandemic predictions have been?

Need help on this?  Send me an email or reach out over LinkedIn.

Image Copyright 123RF

Image Copyright Mark_KA

It's June 6 in Westboro, Massachusetts, USA, and the temperature is 49 degrees Farenheight or 9 degrees Celsius. It's pouring rain and with the exception of 3 nice days in the middle of May, when the temperature was in the 80's, it's been like early April since, well, early April!   The weather sucks.  And in case you aren't familiar with what the weather should be like at this time of year, it should be 80 degrees (27 degrees Celsius) and sunny.  

You may be more familiar when the rant sounds like: "It's almost the end of the quarter, we're only at 65% of forecast, the pipeline is half empty, and nothing is closing. With the exception of 3 nice deals that came in during May, our salespeople have sucked." 

While the crappy weather and your crappy 2nd quarter revenue have crappy in common, there is one huge difference that can help you hit your sales forecast even when the weather forecast is for rain.

As long as you know the monthly sales goal, closing percentage, average order size, and length of the sales cycle, I will guarantee that you will meet or exceed the sales goal.  Let's pretend:

• The monthly goal is $100,000
• The closing percentage is 20%
• The average sale or account is $25,000
• The sales cycle is 6 months.

If you do the math and nothing else but the math, then as long as 20 new opportunities, worth a total of $500,000, enter the pipeline each month, beginning 6 months ahead of the first monthly goal you intend to meet or exceed, you will never miss another sales goal ever again.

Let's walk through the Algebra.  If you close 1 of 5 then 5/1 x $100,000 is $500,000.  But you can't just have one or two big opportunities worth $500,000 in the pipeline because you close only 1 of 5.  Remember, your average sale is $25,000 so you'll need close 100,000/25,000 or 4 and at 20% that's 4 x 5 for 20 opportunities.  Finally, with your 6 month sales cycle, what you add to the pipeline in June represents December revenue, not June, so beginning this month you're working on next year's revenue.

As long as you manage what you can control - the new opportunities that enter the pipeline - then you will never miss another number again.

Back to the weather.  Consider my rule of puppies, which says that the harder it is raining, the more often the puppy will want to go outside and make sure that I get wet. And don't forget the rule of spring baseball, which states that the more games our son is scheduled to play during April, May and June, the colder and wetter the weather will be.

I just love it when cool gets cooler and I'm not talking about the winter weather in New England.  About a month ago, I wrote this article on Targeting and shared a generic model for scoring opportunities.  George Bronten and Henrik Oquist, CEO and COO of Membrain, took note and already developed the concept as a new feature for their world-class CRM application, Membrain.  You have to see how we integrated this new feature into the Baseline Selling version of Membrain.  In the image below, you can see that we added a scoreboard milestone at two stages of the sales process.

This allows us to purposefully rescore an opportunity as we learn more about it.  The next image has a little more of the scoring detail.

As you can see from our own instance of Membrain, we score the size, title, urgency, timeline and amount of competition for a particular opportunity.  This opportunity would have received a much higher score if there it was a smaller company, there was greater urgency and the timeline were this month instead of this quarter.  You might be questioning why the score would be higher if the company was smaller...A bigger company has 10 times the number of things that could delay or prevent a sale from closing and while all of those things could also occur with a mid-market or smaller business, they are far less likely at this stage in the sales cycle.  Don't believe me?  Then you don't have enough experience with enterprise size accounts!

Finally, in this listing we can rank opportunities by their scores (right-hand column).

Some CRM applications have the ability to rate the likelihood of closing based on assigned weights to various milestones or stages.  While that is better than when salespeople enter an arbitrary percentage, it's not nearly as good as when you have created specific criteria and values.  Neither man nor machine can skew those things!

In just a few days, this scoring system has had a tremendous impact on our company.  We are able to look at opportunities through a different and more accurate lens, allowing us to make better decisions about sales forecasts, resource allocations, and specific opportunities.

Thanks, Membrain!

The weather has become quite predictive - if you want to know what it will be like in say, an hour.  Meteorologists are still fairly accurate within 24 hours, but for the most part, especially where I live in New England, they are challenged to get it accurate beyond a day in advance.

Think of that in terms of your pipeline, forecast and budget.  We know that forecasts are notoriously inaccurate, but that's when you're looking at the forecast for the month, quarter or year.  Meteorologists would never be accurate if attempting to predict temperatures, precipitation, cloud cover and storms a month in advance.

Are your expectations completely unrealistic when you attempt to forecast sales for the month or quarter?  For most companies, inaccurate forecasts are the norm and expectations for accuracy are insane.  But that's when companies rely on CRM applications that fall victim to any of the following 10 challenges:

• It was designed for customer service rather than sales.
• It has a contact or customer focus rather than an opportunity or sales process focus.
• It was over-designed with too many features.
• It is not user friendly.
• Salespeople hate to enter information into it.
• It's too easy for salespeople to manipulate the likelihood of closing.
• Sales Managers do not regularly inspect opportunities for accuracy and appropriate stage.
• Pipeline is a state of being, not a gap analysis.
• Pipeline is a report rather than a staged, visual representation of the business.
• Salespeople don't live in it and it hasn't become an essential part of the sales culture.

There are dozens of CRM applications out there.  While some are very well-known, like Salesforce.com, others are very obscure.  Well-known doesn't mean you should use it at your company - it might not be right for you.  Obscure doesn't mean that you shouldn't use it at your company - it might be perfect.

In the end, regardless of features, if the salespeople don't embrace it, then it will be a failure.  We have so many clients that bought CRM applications that aren't being used as expected, it's embarrassing.  Yet moving to another CRM application seems like throwing money out the window and admitting that your initiative was a failure.

On the other hand, companies think nothing of changing copier brands - even in the middle of a lease, they change banks when terms or relationships make it necessary, executives move in and out of cars every two years, homeowners cycle through crappy landscapers, we upgrade our phones, tablets and laptops every year or two, and we never think twice!  Why is it such a nightmare to move to another CRM application?

Moving is really not that difficult.  The problem is that it cost a lot of money to customize the first application, get everyone trained, and input all of the data.  There is a huge fear that moving to another application will be just as difficult as the first go-round.  But that's more fear than reality.

For example, we moved a client from a popular CRM application to a more useful and appropriate application.  They did spend and waste a fortune on the first one, they did spend months entering data, they did go through a long and drawn out training program for users and it was a monumental failure.  However, moving to the new application was a easy as pie.  It needed almost no customization, had no complicated navigation, and an hour of training had everybody up and running. The data was imported, not entered manually, and the salespeople love it so much they are not only using it, but embracing it.

The best news of all comes in the form of the client's results:  

• Salespeople are living in CRM!
• Opportunities cannot be arbitrarily moved forward in the sales process.
• The likelihood of closing is calculated based on reality, not hope.
• 100% adoption translates to real time, accurate data in the dashboard.
• Salespeople see their pipeline stage gaps and proactively respond to them.
• Forecasts are accurate.
• Everyone is happy.

It's not that moving to a better CRM application is a new cost or even difficult - it isn't!  It's that for most, walking away from the initial investment of money, time, emotions, commitment and your bad decision is so hard.  But it's not a divorce, it's more like changing banks.  You move away from one that no longer suits your needs and begin working with another that you perceive to be better.

Do you need some help sorting out your CRM situation?  Just shoot me an email and I'll steer you in the right direction.

My wife and I watched with a combination of fascination, sadness and shock as the coach of our son's 12 and under AAU baseball team made them run suicides after the double header they won on Saturday, and again after the double header they won on Sunday.  Why would he punish them after winning four games this weekend?  And how does this apply to sales?  You'll be amazed by what you read.On Saturday, the team had a chance to win both games by the mercy rule (the game ends if one team is ahead by 10 runs or more after 4 innings), but let the other team back into the game both times.  The coach didn't like their effort and execution and taught them a lesson by making them run suicides for 20 minutes after the second game.

On Sunday, the team won the first game, but allowed the other team to tie the second game forcing extra innings.  They eventually had a walk-off win, but once again, he thought they were flat, didn't like their effort, pointed to mental mistakes, and made them run suicides for 30 minutes after the second game.

As his parents, this punishment overshadowed a very impressive ball-crushing performance by our son.  But for the coach, the team's performance comes first.  The coach is paying more attention to behavior, attitude, and effort, than he is to the score.  He believes that by focusing on these three things, he will drive home the lessons he wants them to learn from this.

Shouldn't sales leaders be applying these lessons with their sales organizations?  While the best sales leaders do, in fact, follow this strategy, many sales leaders pay too much attention to sales results - the numbers - while ignoring the significance of metrics and conversion ratios that lead to revenue.

For example, Bob leads the team in sales this quarter with $500,000 in sales and he is praised, recognized, and presented with an award for his outstanding performance.  But it's a sham.  Bob landed one deal the entire quarter instead of the 6 he should have closed.  Although his quota for the quarter was only $300,000 and he killed it, if this deal hadn't come through, he would have been dead last.  Additionally, this deal was forecast for the previous quarter, so he really had nothing going on this quarter.  Had sales management looked more closely, they would have seen that he did not add any new opportunities to the pipeline in the quarter, and had only 6 conversations on just 12 outbound attempts.  Where was his effort?  What's with his attitude?  And where was the behavior?  Should Bob have been the hero or should it have been pointed out that he sucked all quarter and happened to get lucky once?

Clearly, it benefits the entire sales organization to call attention to a big deal and a quota-buster.  We want to make sure that everyone knows that these results can be achieved and should be achieved.  At the same time, if the other salespeople approach Bob and ask how he did it, the opposite effect will occur.  They would learn that it is OK not to make calls, not to have many conversations, and not to convert those conversations to meetings.  Additionally, they would learn that ineffective qualifying and forecasting can pay off, and letting prospects off the hook, not closing the door, and being passive and mentally lazy can work as well.

The scenario with the Bobs of the world is no different than what happened last weekend with the baseball coach.  We can't reward results unless the attitude, effort and execution that led to the results was consistent with those results.  In addition, we shouldn't punish salespeople who put forth the proper effort, attitude, behaviors and execution, only to come up short.  When we identify the most meaningful KPI's, and recognize salespeople for achieving those, the results will come.

[Update - Stick around and read the comments to this article, add one of your own, share it on LInkedIn or Twitter (buttons above the photo) and read this follow-up article.]

Most salespeople don't pay too much attention to this.  Even though we perform a pipeline analysis and restage the pipeline with every individual sales evaluation and comprehensive sales force evaluation we conduct, we typically discuss this exclusively at the executive level.  So imagine my surprise when a salesperson sent along his lessons learned from a session on closing deals and included this...

.

Did you ever watch Peyton Manning, Tom Brady or Aaron Rogers have a bad day at Quarterback?  Did you notice that the following day, everyone was saying that he sucked?  While it's possible that these three Quarterbacks could have a bad day, most of their bad days are less about them and more about whether or not their offensive lines gave them the time and protection they needed to find an open man and make a good pass.  It could also have something to do with whether or not their receivers were able to quickly get open.  Give a good Quarterback enough time and they will make you pay.  Put enough pressure on them and they can look as bad as anyone else.  In football, it's all about cause and effect.  Bad quarterbacking by a good Quarterback is usually the effect, not the cause of the bad performance.

The same thing is true in sales.  We get calls and emails here all day long from busy executives of growing companies who mistakenly believe that they know what they need help with.  The Top 5 Requests are:

1. Selling Value
2. Negotiating Skills
3. Presentation Skills
4. Forecasting
5. Closing Skills

In fairness, most salespeople could stand to improve in these areas, but these are not root causes as much as they are effects.  These five items are the sales equivalent to Quarterbacks having a difficult day.  What we really need to know are, what are the sales equivalents to the offensive line's ability to protect and the receiver's ability to get open?  Let's review these one by one.

Selling Value

Establishing indisputable value to a customer is an outcome based on a collection of capabilities.  It requires that a salesperson have supportive Sales DNA, specifically in the areas of being comfortable talking about money, having a high money tolerance, being a value buyer and not needing to be liked.  It requires that salespeople have consultative selling skills in order to differentiate, uncover compelling reasons to buy from them, and conduct the conversation nobody else is having.  It requires having the ability to connect all the dots, in just the right way, at just the right time.  And finally, there must be a philosophy about selling value and related strategy in place.  To learn more about selling value, join me on November 25 for our presentation on How to Sell Value in Modern Times.  Click here to register.

Negotiating

Negotiating is a trap door that salespeople fall through when, as with value selling, they lack the complete collection of capabilities required to avoid negotiating.  Negotiating is not something in which salespeople should strive to improve.  It's something they can completely avoid.  They must have supportive Sales DNA, specifically, an ability to stay in the moment, be rejection-proof, and not need to be liked.  Even more than with selling value, salespeople must be able to uncover that compelling reason to do business with them and differentiate better than anyone else to have the conversation that nobody else is having with their prospects.  It requires that they have the ability to quantify, cost-justify, and provide a compelling argument for ROI.  Finally, avoiding negotiation requires salespeople to possess excellent qualifiying skills!

Presentation Skills

A presentation is only as good as what was presented, why it was presented, who it was presented to and when it was presented.  Most salespeople present features and benefits instead of solutions, present too early in the sales process, present to the wrong people, and present for the wrong reasons.  The real cause here is a faulty sales process, with demos and presentations mistakenly being sequenced as a milestone to gain interest, instead of a milestone to seal the deal.

Forecasting

A forecast is a human prediction being made by software applications.  The problem is not with the software, as much as it's with the humans that enter the data and override the variables.  The real blame must be given to sales process and qualification. Sales processes that have been inappropriately staged and sequenced will always cause forecasting nightmares.  When it comes to qualification, there are usually two issues.  The first is that salespeople regularly fail to thoroughly qualify because they have chronic cases of Happy Ears.  The second issue is that qualification frequently occurs at the wrong time - either much too early in the sales process, before a prospect has a compelling reason to participate in qualification, or way too late in the process, when salespeople finally learn why a deal hasn't yet closed.

Closing Skills

It appears to many that closing skills are perhaps the most important set of skills a salesperson could have, but the science says otherwise.  Closing is an outcome that occurs naturally and easily after salespeople have thoroughly and effectively navigated all of the prior milestones and stages in their sales process.  Therefore, an apparent lack closing skills is really caused by an ineffective sales process, insufficient Sales DNA, a large skill gap, and most importantly, an inability to sell consultatively and thoroughly qualify.

Do you like my Blog?  Support it by voting for Understanding the Sales Force as Top Sales Blog at Top Sales Awards.

Register for the Top 5 Hidden Factors That Determine the Fate of Your Sales Force - a 45-minute presentation on December 10 at 11 AM Eastern Time.

Read my article over at the Hubspot Blog - What Effective Role Playing Sounds Like.