Blogs

Why deal prioritization quietly limits sales—and what to do instead You're a sales manager. You face this daily resource allocation question:  what should you work on? You’ve got a hundred unread emails. Your team is working hundreds of deals that could close this quarter—but only a fraction will. Your calendar is packed with internal meetings. A forecast update is coming up. Leadership wants your “call” for the quarter. And you’re wondering how you’re going to hit your numbe

Most CROs struggle with forecasting—not because they lack data, discipline, or experience, but because the tools they’re given optimize for forecast accuracy. That goal conflicts with the CRO’s real job: maximizing sales. You can’t do both. Despite modern CRMs and SalesTech stacks, forecasting in most organizations still relies on rollups—summing up deals by category or sales stage. Execution then focuses on delivering the most certain deals. This demands regular forecast rev

It's in our nature to focus on narrative details of each deal. That's what good salespeople do: deeply understand what's going on with their deals. Careful analysis of deal data can add useful insight to that understanding [ https://www.funnelcast.com/post/what-is-insight ]. This is all good! But, even the best understanding yields a collection of deal narratives that are essentially anecdotes—the trees in a forest of deals. Effective teams manage  the forest: they use eviden

The presenter at a recent AI conference put up this slide (courtesy of McKinsey) to demonstrate that “AI maturity varies significantly across and within sectors.” They did this by measuring something McKinsey calls AI Quotient (AIQ) across “800 companies and 20K participants worldwide.” Source: McKinsey AIQ by Sector slide (conference photo) If you’ve been following our blogs you know that we rail against showing simple average (mean) statistics. Point statistics like average

You’ve seen the boasts.  “Within 2%.” “Within 5%.” “Within 10%.” Whatever. Forecast-accuracy headlines abound. Are they real, or performed with smoke and mirrors? How can you tell? We’ve blogged about how unrealistic these claims are  and even how undesirable they are . Yet the headlines continue. And I believe that most of the claims are based on some narrow conditions where the claims are valid. My goal therefore isn’t to debunk anyone’s claim; it’s to understand how it’s p

When I say that you can’t maximize sales and forecast accuracy, people often are confused or take exception. Here’s why you can’t have...

Here's a great interview [1] with Rob Hyndman, one of the world’s leading authorities on forecasting. Rob defines forecasting as: An estimate of the probability distribution of a variable to be observed in the future.  That’s worth pausing on. Forecasting is not about accurately predicting a single number. It’s about understanding the probability distribution of possible outcomes . A probability distribution shows the range of possible outcomes and their relative probabilitie

Generative AI is pretty impressive when it comes to creative writing and generating ideas. But how does it do on optimization problems...

The traditional sales forecasting playbook: Reps categorize each deal — Commit, Best Case, Pipeline, Omitted. Managers roll them up, then...

A basic problem in sales optimization goes like this: You have a goal for the quarter. You have deals in the pipeline. Which deals to...

Your factory consists of four assembly lines. Each one has a hopper that feeds parts at a rate of 4 per hour into a four-stage process....

The 2025 GTM Benchmark Report (page 8) contains this striking statistic: 14% of sellers generate 80% of revenue. Yikes! That got us thinking... Sales concentration by rep is an interesting stat. So we built an interactive Pareto chart in Funnelcast showing sales concentration by rep. It gives you a quick visual read on how revenue is distributed across your sales team. You can spot sales rep concentration instantly, assess what a reasonable quota might be, and see who’s crus

The results from our LinkedIn poll are in. More than half of respondents think forecast accuracy should be part of a sales incentive...

There’s an easier way that helps you sell more. CRM systems have three primary opportunity fields vital to understanding deal health:...

Why are sales teams and their RevTech vendors using broken approaches to estimate win rates? Funnelcast win rates estimate the chance a...

Your average stage-to-stage conversion times are: MQL  → 10 days → SQL  → 15 days → Demo  → 60 days→ Contracts  → 15 days → Won Your...

This is part one of a two part post. See More Conversion Rate Conundrums for the complete analysis. Also see our video explainer on...

Thinking evolves. The earth is round, not flat. The earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. Lightning is electricity,...

I was talking with our CEO and founder Bill Kantor recently. He reflected on the use of CRM data. I've spent a lot of time with sales...

You're asking, "What does Brad Pitt have to do with verbs, adjectives, and sales?" Stay with me. I promise this will make sense. "Adapt...