Top 5 Ways to Stop Striking Out on Your Sales Forecasts

This article will discuss the probability percentage in your pipeline, but first, I’ll present another baseball analogy.

When a team loads the bases with no outs, there is an 86% chance for that team to score at least one run.

It hasn’t quite gone that way of late for the Boston Red Sox.  During August and September, they have loaded the bases with no outs thirteen times, and failed to score in eight of those opportunities.   Failing to score with the bases loaded and nobody out is the least likely of all outcomes, occurring only 14% of the time but it has happened to the Red Sox in 62% of their opportunities. If we zoom out a bit, and consider all scoring opportunities with runners in scoring position regardless of the number of outs, they are batting only .184 in September.

That sounds a lot like pipeline forecasting accuracy, doesn’t it? As a matter of fact, companies routinely get opportunities to the closable stage with a 75% or better probability of closing yet still have win rates below 20%.

There are several reasons why this occurs:

• Insufficient number of qualifying criteria.  The generic version of the Baseline Selling sales process and methodology includes a minimum of 12 milestones that must be met in order for an opportunity to be considered qualified.  Compare that with other popular methodologies where the entire sales process has 4-8 steps.  Check out a comparison here. The baseball equivalent would be to bring in the worst relief pitcher in a tight game even though he is not qualified to pitch in a high leverage situation.
• Lack of a Predictive Sales Scorecard.  Unlike the qualifying milestones, scorecard criteria are conditions that can be scored and used to more accurately predict  a win or loss.  An opportunity can be completely qualified, but that has no bearing on whether or not you will win because there is competition. You can read more about sales scorecards here.  The baseball equivalent would be to not bring in their closer to close out the game because the scoreboard isn’t working and nobody knows the actual inning or score.
• The Sales Scorecard is not integrated into the probability calculation.  If you have a sales scorecard, but it isn’t the primary calculation for the probability score, it’s a waste to bother with a sales scorecard because the scores will be largely invisible.  As an example, check the screen shot belowIn the screen shot above, the probability percentages generated by the CRM app are circled in red. Note that they are based on the completion percentage of the sales process and all five opportunities in the Running Home stage are 58% likely to close.  Conversely, the scores from the sales scorecard are highlighted in green boxes and those scores, which must be greater than or equal to 65 in order to predict a win, are 65, 75, 62, 72 and 75.  It’s also useful to know that scores from the Scorecard do change as the sales process is executed because intelligence changes along the way.
• Gut instinct was inappropriately considered.  How many times have you heard, “I have a good feeling about this. They really like us. I know they’re going with us.  It’s a slam dunk.”  You win the business far less often than you hear those lines, yet those opinions are often used to overwrite the  prediction algorithm.  The baseball equivalent would be sending up the team’s worst hitter as a pinch-hitter on a hunch.
• Lack of rigorous inspection by Sales Leadership. Pipeline reviews are not as common as you might think and when there are pipeline reviews, sales leadership is often guilty of not challenging the currently available state of each opportunity, or being skeptical and thorough enough.  The baseball manager and pitching coach skipping the film review after a blown save would be a similar baseball fail.

The Red Sox will snap out of their funk – perhaps even in time to make the 2025 playoffs and win some post-season games.  What about you? Can you bust out of your pipeline forecasting malaise in time to salvage your last quarter of 2025?

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