Sales Ops Anti-Patterns
An anti-pattern is a common but ineffective and/or counterproductive way to try to solve a problem. Here are two anti-patterns that I...
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Forecast. Plan. Sell.
Uses fake data.
Statistical process control for B2B sales
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Bill Kantor
- Aug 20
- 3 min
A Condor on a Bicycle Meets Spiderman
Steve Jobs was inspired by an article comparing the efficiency of animals and machines. In the animal kingdom, a condor was the most...
Bill Kantor
- Jul 23
- 4 min
Additional Adventures in Averages
How to quantify risk in your sales forecasts and plans. A lot of basic sales data are not normally distributed. In our blog The Menace of...
Bryan Lewis
- Jun 15
- 4 min
The Conceit of Coverage (The Myth, Fiction, and Fact of PCR)
We live in an era of data-driven everything. Using data to help make sound sales decisions is a great idea. But sometimes the abundance...
Bill Kantor
- Jun 4
- 3 min
The Menace of Means
A statistician is someone who has their head in the oven and their feet in the freezer, but “on average” feels fine. It’s funny, but you...
Bill Kantor
- May 17
- 7 min
The Importance of Focusing on Sales Forecasting for Effective FP&A
Special guest article written by Andrew Childress, of TheFP&AGuy. Unless something is seriously broken, chances are that revenue is the...
Bill Kantor
- May 5
- 2 min
The Three Sales Musketeers
Sales Knobs and Win Rate Woes. Our blogs “A Tale of Three Knobs” and “Great Win Rate Expectations” discuss flaws in the ways businesses...
Bill Kantor
- Apr 25
- 2 min
The Magic of Parsimonious Models
“Garbage in, garbage out. How can you make great forecasts with bad data?” You can't. But you can make forecasts less susceptible to the...
Bryan Lewis
- Apr 8
- 4 min
Great Win-Rate Expectations
How not to Estimate Win Rates: "Won/(Won+Lost)" What if I asked you: Among all deals that closed last quarter and were closed won, what...
Bryan Lewis
- Mar 29
- 4 min
Salesforce Basic Data Best Practices
Follow these simple guidelines and you will be amazed at how predictable and understandable your sales process can be! Close Date The...
Bill Kantor
- Mar 24
- 3 min
A Tale of Three Knobs
Your sales process is defined by three independent factors: deal size, generation rate, and win rate. Want to grow sales? Those are the...
Bill Kantor
- Jan 30
- 2 min
Sales dashboard fatigue
A 2016 study published in the National Library of Medicine investigated fatigue in relation to clinical alarms in the Intensive Care Unit...
Bryan Lewis
- Jan 30
- 1 min
Data without insight is noise
We recently encountered a revenue pipeline tool advertising a slick display of lots of opportunity data. It looked something like this...
Bill Kantor
- Dec 13, 2022
- 2 min
How is Funnelcast unique?
Funnelcast provides you with a simple, intuitive model of both your open funnel and prospective-funnel, for this quarter to next year....
Bill Kantor
- Nov 3, 2022
- 4 min
Stop worrying about conversion rates, use this instead
We hear the term “conversion rate” a lot, usually in the context of “this is a KPI we need to watch and improve.” And a lot of energy...
Bill Kantor
- Sep 1, 2022
- 7 min
Why Traditional Sales Forecasts Fail
Traditionally classification forecasts have been the way sales managers have analyzed and reported on their sales funnel. A...
Bill Kantor
- Aug 1, 2022
- 2 min
“... full of sound and fury; signifying nothing."
(Apologies to William Shakespeare.) Beware of too much of the wrong analytics. Revenue operations and sales management go to a lot of...
Bill Kantor
- May 26, 2022
- 4 min
You don't need "AI" forecasting
Just define what you mean by probability; your forecasts will improve, and you can get most of what you get from "AI" forecasting...
Bill Kantor
- May 26, 2022
- 4 min
You don't need "AI" forecasting (part 2)
Do this one thing and you will have most of what you get from the AI forecasting engines. In part 1 of this post, we showed how to...
Bill Kantor
- Mar 29, 2022
- 7 min
Lighting Your Path: A Two-Step Process for Smarter, More Accurate Revenue Forecasts
Imagine you’re on your way to meet a date at the movies. Halfway to the theater, you check the map on your phone and realize you’ve taken...
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