By Adam Thorpe

There’s always been a lot of noise from the CRM providers about how they’ll shift your bell curve, give you an accurate forecast, drive productivity and the list goes on.

To date, many traditional IT solutions and investments such as CRM systems have not been utilised to their maximum advantage and are, therefore, not producing the results many sales leaders expected. Some are just used as an internal management and reporting tools.

– 40% of CRM implementations failed to meet expectations (Gartner)

– 80% of business contacts remain outside the CRM (Datahug)

– 54% of forecasted deals didn’t close (CSO Insights)

– 59% of sellers made quota (CSO Insights)

– 87% of companies made revenue target (CSO Insights)

Every day, pipeline and deal reviews are being conducted and yet these are the results they deliver.

If you really want to have an accurate forecast, have more reps hit their number and win more opportunities you need to understand one key factor and ask one simple question of the seller;

‘who are you talking to’

It sounds a little too simple? This factor and this factor alone delivers the most significant and material impact of the probability of closing and when you combine Relationship Intelligence with Predictive Analytics you can reverse all these numbers.

Relationship Intelligence to show who you’re talking to, the quality of that individual, how engaged they are, what and where the relationship currency is. Read how Qlik did this.

Predicative Analytics to show you the probability of closing and the deals at risk. Read how Brainshark did this.

Not only will this combination of technology reverse these trends and numbers above – you’ll actually be able to accurately and objectively forecast if and when the deal will close.

About Adam:
Managing Director TRED International – driving revenue performance and productivity