One possibility is that it’s difficult to work through a mutual plan if one is not listening to the customer, but telling them what they need. Of course not many will admit to this behavior

There are some answers to this problem in addition to trusting your people.

Here are some thoughts on providing an accurate forecast to yourself (sales person, manager, executive).

Challenge:
Our pipeline is more like a “sewer line”.

Providing more objective pipeline forecasts

By defining a mutually agreed upon ‘evaluation plan’ with prospects or customers about what they and you need to know to buy your products and services provides clarity to opportunities in the pipeline. These ‘evaluation plans’ include decision points or milestones that when completed in a mutually satisfactory manner, can result in moving an opportunity towards a successful conclusion for both parties.

This ‘evaluation plan’, when negotiated with objective measurement of each decision point or milestone, allows the determination of a statistically valid assessment of the quality of the individual sales territory pipeline. The cumulative sales pipeline of all individuals allows sales managers an ability to determine not only the current month’s revenue forecast, but also the quality of the sales pipeline with sufficient notification to allow corrective action.

Accordingly, senior management is then allowed the capability to determine the size, quality, and needed corrective action to ensure successful revenue generation on a continuing basis.

Unfortunately, though few organizations have ‘objective’ milestones to measure sales opportunities, thus, they are forced to come up with multiple views of the forecast:

Stretch, Expected, Most Likely,…….and on and on!