Pipeline Management

Inaccurate forecasts, a common complaint among sales executives are a symptom of a more pernicious problem: failing to incorporate the customer’s point of view in the development and implementation of sales strategy.

Poor forecasting isn’t the problem in and of itself. The real problem is a seller-focused sales strategy. Too often, sellers think activities such as giving presentations or submitting proposals constitute the major milestones of a sales strategy. While these activities are important to making a sale, they are inadequate if they are not balanced with some measure of milestone which memorialises the customers’ perspectives. As with all other sales activities, leave out the customer and you have no idea if you are on the way to making a sale. After all, you might be checking off all the boxes in the early stages of your pipeline, but your buyers might be in the latter stages of their buying process. If that disparity isn’t accounted for, your forecast will be off.

Effective pipeline tools are representations of two aspects of each sale: the events that the seller has conducted arrayed against the buyer’s incremental commitments to make a buying decision. Aligning these two points of view allows sellers to quickly develop a customer-oriented sales strategy that focuses on a logical completion of the important pipeline milestones.

The development of an effective sales strategy requires sellers to have three skills regarding an understanding of how buyers make buying decisions:

1. the ability to recognise where buyers are in their decision cycle at any particular time,
2. the ability to execute the specific skills that create value for customers at each stage, and
3. the ability to move buyers both forward and backward in their decision cycle.

Once you attain these skills and develop an effective strategy, accurate forecasting will follow. Accurate forecasting is the natural bedfellow of an effectively executed customer-driven strategy. With the skills to incorporate the customer’s point of view into the sales strategy, accurate forecasts are the natural byproduct of a good sales pipeline tool.