I was chatting to a good friend and mentor on the weekend, discussing my new role leading Prevu and the need for a specialist forecasting platform in modern B2B sales. My friend, an enterprise sales veteran with hundreds of quarterly forecasts under his belt, declared, “It doesn’t matter how good your forecasting tool is, if you can’t judge what deals are going to close when, you can’t forecast accurately!”
Never have truer words been spoken about enterprise sales forecasting.
Mathematical models that calculate the outputs based on the inputs have a role to play in predicting the performance of businesses where the sales cycle follows consistent and predictable patterns.
But there’s a reason enterprise sales is often referred to as complex sales. The lumpy, complex and variable nature of enterprise selling means that predicting with confidence where the business will land is dependent on accurately predicting individual deal outcomes.
And if you are running a scale business, you have to be able to predict those outcomes at scale. That’s why most of the CRO’s I have known over the past 20 years who have led large operations (my insightful friend being one of those) have had photographic deal memory: the ability to recall the detail underlying literally dozens of in-quarter opportunities. At this level, it seems this is a skill essential to building confidence in the forecast.
So, when it comes to enterprise sales, if you’re in the forecasting business, you’re also in the deal prediction business.
