Excellent post, Lee. I agree with all that you said. It is an extremely hard sell to convince the reps in the field to use SFA.
I can give you one true and accurate statement about sales forecasts - they are nearly always wrong. Although a company might end up at the end of the quarter with a total that looks like it is about the same as the forecast, the actual done deals to get there will look very different at the end of the quarter than those predicted 3 months earlier.
Some deals will be bigger, some smaller. Some deals that looked like sure things dropped out, and some bluebirds flew in. Sometimes, there will be more revenue than planned, so those deals are slid into the next quarter. When a company comes up short, there is always clever accounting, special last minute deals offered, etc.
I'll bet that in the typical high tech company, if you looked at the deals listed, the projected closure date, and the revenue projected, say on the first day of the quarter you'd see a correlation on the order of about 50 - 60% compared to what actually happened.
I suppose that prior to SFA implementation, some companies had a 25 - 35% correlation, and good use of SFA might drive it to 50 - 70%, so it is a vast improvement - but very far from being close to perfect.
Just my observations after doing this for a while in the real world. |
