For sales leaders, the job happens in cycles.

Each week, you sit down and try to get your head around the pipeline. What’s real. What’s moved. What’s likely to close. What isn’t.
You form a view, and pass it up the chain along with the story that supports it.

A week later, you do it again.

In the market research we recently completed, this came through very clearly. Leaders aren’t updating their view of the business each week.  A lot of the time they’re rebuilding it.

We heard that when what’s actually changed is not clear, you’re back in the detail, going deal by deal, trying to re-establish your view of the path to the number. A week ago, you built a story. Now you’re rebuilding it.

Without clarity of what’s changed in your pipeline, it’s not an incremental exercise. It’s a reset.
And it takes time.

Time that should be spent working with the team, digging into deals and getting in front of customers. The parts of the job that actually move the number.

One thing came through clearly: understanding what’s changed is critical.
Yet the systems you rely on mostly don’t help with that. They only give you a picture of where things are.

Everything else you’re left to reconstruct yourself.