Blogs

Last month I blogged that All forecasts are wrong. Some are useful . The article underscored that forecast accuracy is overhyped—a...

“How accurate are your forecasts?” Almost everyone goes there when evaluating sales forecasting applications. And it makes sense. Who...

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...

Steve Jobs was inspired by an article comparing the efficiency of animals and machines. In the animal kingdom, a condor was the most...

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 Means , we explored what to do when summarizing these data. Non-normal distributions are very common in basic sales data. But sales forecasts are also sometimes non-normally distributed. That can wreak havoc on your ability to interpret and deliver on a forecast, unless you are appropriately aware. Let's look at examples of how non-normal d

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...

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...

Special guest article written by Andrew Childress, of TheFP&AGuy . Unless something is seriously broken, chances are that revenue is the...

The key to better sales forecast, plans, and resource optimization Our blogs “ A Tale of Three Knobs ” and “ Great Win Rate Expectations ” discuss flaws in the ways businesses measure win rates. Why is this so important? The output and productivity of your sales process is defined by three factors: win rate, deal generation rate (how frequently you start new deals), and deal size. (Wondering "what about sales cycle?" We'll get to that shortly.) These are reasonably within you

“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...

Looking for the Excel win rate calculator ? Looking for our review of win rates methods (w/recipe for building win-rate curves)? How not...

Your sales process is defined by three independent factors: deal size, generation rate, and win rate. Want to grow sales? Those are the...

A 2016 study published in the National Library of Medicine investigated fatigue in relation to clinical alarms in the Intensive Care Unit...

We recently encountered a revenue pipeline tool advertising a slick display of lots of opportunity data. It looked something like this...

Funnelcast provides you with a simple, intuitive model of both your open funnel and prospective-funnel, for this quarter to next year....

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...

Traditionally classification forecasts have been the way sales managers have analyzed and reported on their sales funnel. A...

(Apologies to William Shakespeare.) Beware of too much of the wrong analytics. Revenue operations and sales management go to a lot of...

Just define what you mean by probability; your forecasts will improve, and you can get most of what you get from "AI" forecasting...

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...