Do you find that opportunities slip from one month to the next, that sales professionals are over-optimistic, that dead-cert deals come to nothing, and that time is wasted chasing unwinnable business? And then you have to explain to your CEO why you failed to hit your forecast.
B2B sales leaders in complex and solution sales are under particular pressure to improve forecasts and deliver greater sales productivity. Managers can spend as much as half a day a week on forecasting activity alone. Yet 80% of sales organisations miss their forecasts — in the US alone, this costs businesses an estimated $50 billion a year (Source: CFO Magazine).
Ask a hundred sales professionals their win rate and the answer is almost always the same: three out of ten. The equivalent of millions of sellers spend the bulk of their time losing — their single biggest waste of time.
I meet hundreds of sales professionals each year, and always ask the same question: “What is your win rate?” They almost always respond with the same answer — three out of ten. With around 5 million B2B salespeople across the US and UK, that means the equivalent of 3.5 million of them are wasting their time losing. It is their biggest waste of time.
Qualification exists to stop this
The discipline of qualification is designed to avoid exactly this. Clearly, many sales professionals working in complex sales environments have yet to fully understand its underlying principles. There are deals which are winnable and deals which will never be won. Too often, sales teams keep ploughing in resources when a forensic view of the data would say walk away — and that’s not just at the beginning of the sale, but throughout it.
Three questions every forecast depends on
Three questions need to be answered before you can honestly forecast an opportunity:
- Will they ACT? — or will this project quietly be deprioritised?
- Will they act NOW? — within the timeframe you’re forecasting?
- Will they act WITH US? — rather than with an incumbent or a cheaper rival?
Robust qualification is what answers them. And it has long been hindered by CRM systems’ failure to support a continuous qualification process — they were built to record activity at a point in time, not to re-qualify a deal as it changes.
From periodic guesswork to continuous evidence
This is the gap SCOTSMAN® AI closes. It runs the qualification on every opportunity continuously, captures what the customer has actually committed to do, and surfaces the moment a deal’s real position changes — enabling sales leaders to take back control of opportunity management and gain a forensic understanding of their pipeline. The result is the thing every sales leader is chasing: forecasts that are genuinely predictable, consistent and reliable.
