Leaders often evaluate their sales pipelines based on the likelihood of closing deals. However, this can be a common mistake. The chance of closing is a subjective measure that depends on the sales rep’s judgement about their odds of making a sale. This process involves interpretation and bias, which can lead to misuse. Instead, focus on tracking how far a prospect has moved through your sales pipeline, with each stage showing the percentage of progress made. A completed sale is one that is either closed or lost.
This seven-stage pipeline shows how tracking the percentage of progress can improve sales forecast accuracy. The pipeline includes several phases: We begin with Opportunity Creation and then go to Qualification, where we evaluate a prospect’s budget, timeline, and the decision makers involved.
A fully qualified prospect reaches the Presentation stage to discuss pricing, goes through Negotiation, and then enters Verbal Approval and, finally, the Closed stage. Whether the deal is won or lost, it’s still — in the end — closed.
Measuring an opportunity in terms of the percentage of the pipeline completed, instead of the probability of the sale itself happening, helps emphasize that sales pipelines and forecasts are objective, scientific tools that require sales reps to follow a very specific process.
When a seller thinks that moving an opportunity through the pipeline increases its probability of closing, they’re less likely to use that pipeline accurately. They’ll hold back on moving deals into fully-qualified stages until they’re convinced that they’ll close. This then limits the opportunities they put into the pipeline in the initial stages because they don’t want to use the pipeline to manage deals they might lose. They arbitrarily change the probability percentage to match how they “feel” about the opportunity.
However, when the measurement is changed from probability of close to percentage complete, sellers will use the pipeline to track all opportunities and you’ll have an accurate measure of how opportunities convert from inception to close.
This change requires a shift in thinking, of course. Saying that a negotiation is 90 percent complete no longer means that it’s necessarily 90 percent likely to close. You may only close 60 or 75 percent of the deals you negotiate, which is something that you’ll know based on past data and history.
In rethinking the sales process this way, every step of the process represents a set of tasks or activities that have to be completed in order to move the deal through the pipeline. It’s no longer about the probability of closing — a subjective opinion from the sales rep — but the percentage completed in the sales cycle, which is an objective statistic based on facts.
If the sales team is properly using the pipeline, then sales leaders can get a truly accurate view of the conversion ratios between one stage and the next. After watching these conversion ratios for a few quarters, you’ll be able to create an accurate forecast based on historical facts. From there, you can develop a forecast that’s within five percent accuracy every time. One of our clients in the industrial supply industry even manages to get within three percent of the quarterly forecast!
By applying this fundamental change of measuring percentage complete, as opposed to probability of close to your sales process, not only will you gain accuracy in your forecast…You’ll encourage your sales team to utilize the sales pipeline the way it’s supposed to be used and you’ll have the most visibility into your opportunities.
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