The Sales Manager’s Silent Struggle

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 number.

Ideally, an optimal deal prioritization consistently delivers the most sales while controlling for risk. What do you do? Where do you put your time and resources to maximize sales? You think: 

I could work last week’s Commits. But they don't get me to my goal. Some deals are too small to matter. Most have a short lead-time to close. Shouldn’t I help advance some earlier-stage deals?

Working the Commit list feels safe—but it’s clearly suboptimal. You think, "Maybe I should work on the biggest deals?"

I don’t need many of these mega-deals to hit the number. But putting all my resources on those makes for a very risky outcome.

So that’s suboptimal too. "Interrupts!" You could be interrupt driven.

But interrupts will pull me in too many directions to be consistently optimal.

What should you do? “Deal scores,” you think.

We could focus resources on the most likely deals first. But many of those are small. It’s not that different from working Commits.

You’re back where you started. None of these approaches optimize sales. What do you do?

You do what sales managers have always done. You start with one of these suboptimal lists and layer in your expert judgment—adding some deals, removing others—in an attempt to maximize sales and manage risk.

This isn’t wrong. Experience matters. But it’s ad hoc—neither systematic nor repeatable. And while it’s better than blindly following any one list, it’s still demonstrably suboptimal.

There is a better alternative.

What if, with no additional work on your part, you could start each day with an optimized, rank-ordered focus list—one designed to maximize expected sales for an acceptable level of risk? Then you apply your judgment on top of that optimized baseline.

In practice, this approach delivers materially better results—on average, a 60% productivity improvement over the methods above.

Sales managers and reps are understandably skeptical of new SalesTech. So much of it has overpromised and underdelivered. Worse, instead of reinventing things to make them better, most SalesTech simply streamlines old-school processes and KPI reporting. Faster PCR measurements that tell you little. More rollups, more calls, more manual effort—to produce unreliable forecasts that don’t help teams sell more.

This approach is different. It doesn’t ask salespeople to do more work, become CRM data custodians, or follow another process. It leverages your existing sales process and replaces ad hoc prioritization with a better starting point—one that automatically and consistently maximizes sales while controlling for risk. Less guesswork. Fewer debates. Clearer focus. You work the winnable deals earlier in the quarter. You get more time to sell. 

If you spend a lot of time debating deal forecast categorizations or if you are working too many deals you don’t win, this perspective may resonate. Instead of just giving you a forecast, it improves sales by showing you where to focus. Better focus doesn’t require more meetings or more process—just a better starting point. If you’d like to see how this works in practice, we’re happy to share examples or walk through it together.