The Questions You're Not Asking That Kill a Forecast in 5 Minutes

Tom Boston: If your forecast depends on how confident your reps sound instead of what they can prove, you're not forecasting. You're gambling with your credibility. Because for sales leaders, forecasting isn't a spreadsheet exercise. It's a headcount, it's a cash flow, it's board trust. It's whether you've seen as someone who actually knows their business. In this episode we dig into forecasting the way leaders experience it in the real world. Richard Smith is joined by Chris Lingenfelter, uh, who runs a 50 plus rep org at ah, level up and Nigel Arthur, uh, Enterprise SaaS leader and former SVP. Together they unpack why most forecasts fail, how emotion and optimism quietly wreck accuracy, and what disciplined leaders do differently. You'll hear why good pipeline doesn't mean forecast, how to spot risk early and how to build a forecasting culture rooted in truth, not hope. I'm your host, Tom Boston and welcome to the surviving sales leadership sessions from my sales coach. Let's get into it.

Richard Smith: I am gonna introduce our great artists today. This is the forecasting 10 of the sales, uh, the Sales Leisure festival. And I'm delighted to have two real experts on the topic join me today. And I'm gonna let them both introduce themselves, starting with Chris Lingenfelter. Uh, Chris, welcome to the stage.

Chris Lingenfelter: So I lead all sales customer success reps over at LevelUp. I've been doing this for over a level up for over three years now. I actually lead a team of over 50 reps, 6 CSMs, 5 sales team leads and uh, 2 SDR. Manage quite a big team.

Richard Smith: I'd also like to invite to introduce himself, uh, Nigel Arthur. Nigel, welcome.

Nigel Arthur: Thank you Rich. So Nigel Arthur, been in sales seemed like forever. Recent roles in the past 10 years, managing director, uh, SVP of sales in B2B software SaaS always been enterprise sales heavy. So I've been on many a, uh, forecast meeting both for the teams that I've run and some of those tougher forecast meetings with those above, perhaps the execs and the board. So plenty of experience of really understanding the do's and the don'ts and the challenges from a leadership point of view. I mean it's a tough gig, uh, not just for the rep but for the leader in collectively forecasting for the business.

Richard Smith: So we're going to start with just a little bit of a run of the show today. So we're going to start by actually starting at a very interesting point around what is the actual purpose of a forecast. We get asked to do these things all the time as sales leaders. I think it's important to get some clarity and perspective on why they are so important. But then we're going to talk about, okay, they're so important, but what are the problems that lead to inaccurate forecasting? Then we're going to move on to some of the things that you can do as a sales leader to really level up your forecasting game, putting down some of those ground rules and some of those best practices. And we're also going to be bringing this to life with something that I'm a little bit nervous by because I'm going to play the role as the sales rep. Nigel and Chris is my sales leaders, where we're going to be doing a live, uh, deal review so they can show the kind of the process or the types of questions they would ask to start to get clarity on any deals that we do, any deals that get forecasted. Well, let's start with this question, Chris. What, what is the purpose of a forecast really?

Chris Lingenfelter: It's about knowing the truth. There's several different key reasons that come into it. Uh, one of them is resource allocation. If you're able to forecast your pipeline and predict what's coming, to a certain extent, it's never going to be perfect. And it's not about being perfect. But a forecast essentially tells you whether to hire, start, ramping, headcount, you know, adjust capacity, or if you start needing to be pulling back on that. The other thing is, when it comes to cash flow, board confidence is leadership and investors want predictability. That's just the reality. A forecast to a certain extent helps protects that credibility and keep surprises, you know, from coming up in the future. And so the more confidence you can give to the board, shareholders, for example, this is going to go into dictating funding rounds, more budget to continue. The other thing is also, I would say strategic planning forecasts let you model best case versus commits, see gaps early in the pipeline, and if you need to start a testing your GT in place, without that, it's going to be hard to pivot and make interpretations of what's going on in the market and your actual sales cycles and also just holding reps accountable. There has to be accountability from leadership all the way down to, you know, a sales development representative. So across the board there has to be accountability. And the only way to do accountability is to have forecasting and pipeline and deal stages that you can accurately track to a certain extent.

Nigel Arthur: Very well said, Chris. Giving the rep the ability to be confident in their business and know their business uh, inside out, giving the sales leader confidence in the team and in the sales approach, in the, in the rate of work, the pace of work. More importantly, in my experience is that executive um, you uh, know, dashboard or that the optics at executive level is do, do we have the right strategy Longer term, is our go to market hitting the mark? Are we forecasting indicating industries that we expected to uh, is our ICP accurate from a go to market point of view? And you uh, know you mentioned product as well Chris. Is the business the forward looking image of our business living up to the expectations of our plan? And then it's confidence in the team from an exec point of view. We got the right people in place top to bottom to execute on the business that we have forecast in those different areas. So yeah, element of predictability but, but you know, if there was one word it would be confidence. Confidence that this is working.

Richard Smith: Why do you think it's important for like a sales leader to be from a kind of a self image point of view to be effective at forecasting? When you think about your role in

Nigel Arthur: the business, I think being an effective forecaster um, as a sales leader means that you've managed or you've succeeded in the element of consistency across the team. So you've succeeded in implementing a constant uh, uh, framework by which the salespeople are using that to forecast. For me it shows that your team understands the importance of the predictability of pipeline. But it really is about taking pride in the forecast that you submit. You know, to an extent when you said about it being, you know, you want leaders that take a pride and in fact you want the whole sales team to develop an ego around the fact they're good at forecasting. If you radiate that it's really powerful in the business to be accurate and know your business.

Richard Smith: Let's go into some like questions. Chris. Obviously you've highlighted the importance of forecasting. How frequently should you be doing this? If you're running a team or if you're leading revenue, how frequently should you be forecasting?

Chris Lingenfelter: Forecasting I believe should be happening on a weekly basis, minimum. And this is where you can sit down with your reps, do pipeline reviews with them, seeing where pipeline stages are being met, seeing where there's a deal slippage, where you know, certain deals are going over the time frame for the certain allotment in the sales pipeline. But it has, has to be happening on a weekly basis. It's not uh, and especially in sales and it's just such A fast moving environment. If you're doing this once, once a month or once a quarter, you're going to miss things. There's just no way around it. And honestly the more that you can, as just a revenue leader and a sales leader, be looking at your forecasting, looking at your rep steel stages, working with your managers to make sure individual teams are hitting those key KPIs and metrics, you're going to be better off in success. And I would say if you're not doing that at least once a week, you're falling behind pretty significantly.

Richard Smith: I uh, think when you were talking about before, like great forecasting helps you make decisions on things like hiring plans, right? If you're only forecasting once a month, for example, like you need to be more dynamic than that, right? You need to be potentially like that. That could impact a new hire coming on board by one month or two months if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're not forecasting regularly enough. And that can obviously have an impact on contribution to revenue. So yeah, as you said, I'm taking from that it's a very uh, sort of dynamic regular process. The second question I think we've already answered, I think, I think we answered it before that this is not just a solo sales leader task, this is a team wide thing that people should be proud of. Who do you think should have in the business should have visibility to the forecast?

Nigel Arthur: There's going to be the collective number that the rep for the individual forecasts add up to. And in my experience there's got to be an override at manager level where you look at that number. I personally would not ever project that number right up. I would have something to say around the collective number that I'm given. So I would certainly um, share the rep level forecast across the team. I would be fairly transparent about what forecast I would be sending upwards. But certainly executives wouldn't have visibility of rep level forecasting. Now I know that's a bit of a sweeping statement because some CRMs don't let you override. So it can be that transparent. In my experience that can change the element of forecasting given by a rep if they know that everyone is, you know, on the board or executive team is looking at their numbers. So I think obviously the exec team need to know what the forecast is. And back to Chris point on a weekly basis, the team themselves need to know what the team is forecasting. You know, I've harshly used the figure, used the expression forecasting to Fail, which is quite brutal. But reps need to understand what it's like if, if you're forecasting individually or as a team, under your quota, what do you find?

Richard Smith: Maybe some kind of like benchmarks around like an acceptable level of accuracy when it comes to the forecasting. And maybe another way of thinking about that is, is there like a percentage that if you're below that consistently month to month, quarter on quarter, you kind of accept there's a problem there?

Chris Lingenfelter: Man, that's a loaded question. So every company, every board that you work with is going to be entirely different on what they deem as acceptable. I would say if you had to do a rule of them, if you're in enterprise B2B you probably want to be within a 10% margin by quarter end. I would say if you're within a 10% margin, you're probably on the right track because it's never going to be perfect. And anybody saying that they can get this down to perfection is just, is lying to you. It changes in mid market. I would say mid market, you know, be just because as you go down, you know, even into early stage starters and SMBs, there's just more volatility in those markets. And so you could say that 15 to 20% in mid market, maybe 20 to 30% in if you're targeting SMB early stage startups. But it's one of those things that it's never going to be consistent from every organization you want to go to. And so this is something that you have to sit with leadership down, just see what the tolerance level is. And yeah, it's just one of those things that's going to be entirely hard to predict. But if I was doing enterprise B2B I would want to be in a 10% margin of error.

Richard Smith: Let's kind of dive into some of these areas in a bit more detail. And Chris, what's your experience of when you just kind of go off the word of the sales rep when they're telling you, hey, this is my deal, this is what I think. Where have you seen that go wrong?

Chris Lingenfelter: Well, it's usually tied to emotion. I mean uh, nobody wants to fail, nobody wants to be a quota or KPI. And when you allow, I guess, or leave more open the possibility of the rep to use their emotion to dictate the forecast, this is where it's primarily going to go wrong. Nobody wants to say they're off quota. Who does? Not even I. And so what you'll see with reps is they'll under report or they will over report saying, hey, yeah, uh, these deals are going to close. So they have the, you know, the perception of that they're hitting their metrics. And then a month later, a quarter later, you realize, okay, no, we're nowhere near those metrics. And that's actually ties back why it's important do pipeline checks on a rep level because you have to go through individual deals and just see where they're at, review the notes of those deals, you know, see who the champion is. Has, you know, the economic buyer been brought in? Are we actually solving a pain point for the organization? And estimate your times to close from there. But the really the biggest problem is, is just emotion that ties into it. And this can be from the top all the way down to your, uh, individual sales development reps. When there's not clear pipeline metrics of when actual deals should be entering into the pipeline or different stages, there always needs to be clear entry and exit criteria. What has to be done to enter into like a qualified buyer stage? What has to be done to enter into a contract PO stage? And I would say honestly, with 90% of organizations, there's no clear entry or exit criteria. And this goes into data. If the reps don't have, uh, clarity around where deals should be at the time frame they should be and when they should exit those stages, that's going to have an impact on all downstream data from any, any metric that you're looking to, to forecast.

Richard Smith: How harmful have you seen it be when it comes to forecasting and how do you kind of try and stop it from happening?

Chris Lingenfelter: It's incredibly detrimental just to the overall forecast because essentially what's going to happen is you're going to underinvest. That can be less marketing efforts. It can be less sales spend, hiring less people as well. And when these deals actually move and close, it comes as a surprise. Now granted, it's a good surprise when they come in and close. No one's about who's going to complain about that. But that actually has kind of a ripple effect into next quarter. Because if we say we have 50 reps and they're all sandbagging deals, then we are not spending the actual resources we need to do to increase our targets for the rest of the fiscal year. And I would say that there's a few symptoms. I would say the most common symptom of why this happens with reps is reps don't trust leadership. It's a culture problem, essentially a symptom of fear. And so instead of them trusting leadership to handle Mrs. And guide them through Mrs. They're constantly playing defense instead of essentially telling the truth. You know. And I would say that's actually one of the most common reasons why you have reps stand back to feel this

Richard Smith: is all about helping the business make strategic decisions. Keep on coming back to that as far as the importance here and Nigel, let's, let's switch on like some of the problems that maybe sales leaders create for themselves when it comes to bad forecasting and I like this one. Is this kind of pressure to want to deliver good news to the board or to your boss. Tell us a little bit about what we like, what we mean about that and why that isn't a good thing.

Nigel Arthur: I've absolutely witnessed this in my career is where there is a heavy expectation that you will forecast even in tough times above your number. You feel under significant pressure to perhaps feel a bit more bullish about some deals that don't necessarily have all the key components of a forecastable deal. Now it might be that you've got good confidence in your pipeline, but forecasting as we know is about the truth of deals closing in a certain timeframe. And what we're seeing with the pressure that comes down from the board or your management is hedging your bets that those deals are going to come in. So almost putting an emotion on the forecast, which we know is a bad idea and we know forecasting is about the truth. It's, it's about uh, a fair and accurate indication of what the business is, is doing good or bad. And you know, if it's bad, then we've got things that we need to do to correct it. Uh, and actions, expectations that we need to set properly again above to the business. So really important that leaders don't bow to this pressure. It's like, you know, giving yourself enough rope to hang yourself. Because if you do start down this road of bowing to this pressure, it ends pretty badly because it reflects on your ab. To understand your business, you don't bow to that pressure. Tell the truth even if it's not great. But if you're delivering not great news to the execs, just have a solid, uh, list of reasons and not necessarily justification. Have some more truths as to why that's not happening. Again, it might be out of your control, it might be marketing. We're not playing the blame game. But it might not all be down to your team. But it's the time to tell the truth.

Richard Smith: What do you see the knock on impact when there isn't Shared understandable framework being used to qualify ideals.

Nigel Arthur: It makes forecasting at leadership level virtually impossible. I would say that because you've got a collection of people that are all using their emotions instead of a framework. They're all using different checklists or different experiences they may have had at different jobs they've had. It really is a real challenge for, for a sales leader if everyone is using a different mechanism, a different uh, percentage of gut instinct, emotion, perhaps they're feeling the pressure more. There's nothing worse than having a team of reps where their variation in confidence and ability is quite widespread. You've got people that are very conservative, people are very risk averse, uh, all people are very bullish. It makes it impossible as a leader, uh, to put a great forecast.

Richard Smith: We're going to kind of move away from some of the problems with forecasting more to some solutions. Right. And this big theme, as we were talking about this topic before this webinar, like the theme really came down to ground rules. Right. It's important to have ground rules. We've hinted at these. Chris, you've talked about ground rules from a kind of CRM deal stage perspective. Nigel, you've talked about ground rules from like qualification frameworks. Let's dive deeper, uh, into that. How do you start that process of mapping out what stages should I have and what should be the time frames I should assign those different deals to? Just give people a little bit of context there.

Chris Lingenfelter: Yeah. So this is going to depend from organization to organization. Really. The main thing is you have to look at kind of your buyer stages is once, uh, once we have that first conversation, what is the typical flow for the company to do? Is it kind of a more of a transactional close, like maybe one or two calls to close? Is this more of an enterprise deal where there's buyer committees, procurement, legal processes and so all this will kind of dictate how you set up your deal stages and CRMs. It's important though that there has to be an actual entry and exit criteria. And this is going to go back to, you know, the frameworks that we touched on just before. When you're doing it at a rep level, obviously you're going to have something first is like o, okay, they're within the, you know, our icp. We're setting a discovery call that could be a deal stage. Deal stage from discovery call to actually fully qualified, they met the framework that your company is using to actually move them into qualified op. You know that there's actually a problem, there's an economic buyer that you've talked to, there's, you know, some type of champion within the organization and that you know how they're actually doing their procurement and evaluation process. Now I would say once you get those and you can move them into as a qualified buyer. But each of those needs a time frame as well. If you move some, somebody into, uh, you know, let's say, okay, they're a qualified buyer, we expect this to be, you know, a 30 day sales cycle and you're 90 days past that, why are they still in that stage? And so it's important that you have those hard caps on these stages so you kind of know where you're at. And also when you're doing these weekly pipeline reviews, you can say, okay, well we're already past this stage. We either need to move them back into, get them on board, find you know, the actual buyers within the accounts, start re engaging more aggressively and this will also keep your forecasting more accurate as well.

Richard Smith: One thing I took there I've seen as a consistent issue in my sales career. Even for those companies that have stages set in the CRM, what's funny is that deals very rarely move back a stage. It's like there's this kind of like made up rule that they can only move forward when actually the most accurate forecasting can come from saying, do you know what, we have actually taken a couple of steps back in this deal. We've lost our champion or something has happened which actually maybe we have gone back a bit, which is fine. Right? Sometimes that does happen. The worst thing you can do is just say, oh, just keep the deal at the current stage when it doesn't actually reflect what is the reality of that stage. So I think one thing I would encourage you to do is be challenging your reps on, hey, should we be moving this deal back a stage, not just keeping it where it is, should we be moving it backwards? Because that's going to help not just great forecasting, it's going to help them get more perspective on what actions they need to take to progress that deal.

Chris Lingenfelter: Yeah, and that's a great point because what happens if your champion switches jobs or there's a layer on. Right. You haven't talked to economic buyer yet. So does that stay in the qualification the qualified opportunity stage with a projected close rate? Probably not, because now you have to go back, find somebody who's going to be taking this internally and kind of socializing internally and then also figuring out, well, who's going to sign the contract, who's going to sign off on the spend. And the thing is is it gets more complex the higher upstream that you go. You know, from mid market to enterprise enterprise there's going to be buyer committees. It's not just one person making that shot. And then you have the procurement stages to get through. And this is actually a problem that I don't see. See even enterprise AES do enough uh, is they never ask well what's your procurement process look like? What does your legal process look like once we get past procurement and we start sending over, you know, MSAs to you? That's very rarely asked in most sales organizations. That's such a vital part of the actual process. But because procurement can be six months, you know, just depending on what you're selling, I mean it can be a very long time just to get through procurement. And then after you get through procurement you, you might have another two to three months of legal depending on what you're doing, you're selling.

Richard Smith: Yeah. Or even what is the workloads of your legal team like right now? Um, like you know that's, that's a, that's a something I've seen like uh, workloads can, can vary and it's not that they don't have uh, not just their process which is important but when are they actually going to get to looking at this contract like that can, that can have a big knock on impact. Tell us what you mean about this like analogy. Make forecasting weather report.

Nigel Arthur: When we're talking about our forecast, uh, and we're talking about our business, we are describing something based on, on fat.

Chris Lingenfelter: Yeah.

Nigel Arthur: And it's really important that we are level headed and we are confident based on the facts that we've made assessments on within our team. Whether that comes from sales stage progression, it comes from our checklist of forecasting items. It's our confidence. But it should be a non emotional process. If it starts to get emotional it means that we're willing it to be more than it is and we're getting emotional about, about particular deals. I remember clearly years ago a rep saying to me oh uh, yeah, yeah I really, I really think this is going to close, you know and that attitude of hope and thinking and praying for this deal to close is the opposite of where we should be. It should be based on my assessment of you know, whatever framework we're using. I know that the deal is going to be closing on this particular date because here's the evidence I have to support that. So that's where this came from. One of My ex sales leaders used to say this to me. Think of it like a weather report. It's the same concept. You know, you've got to tell the truth.

Richard Smith: Yeah. Like it might be the forecast might not look great whether tomorrow, but if that's the reality. And also you know, weather forecasts can change. Like coming back to Chris's point about weekly forecasting, like they don't always get it bang on or things can change in the atmosphere or whatever it may be. And so the forecast tomorrow might look slightly different to what the, to what it looked like uh, yesterday. I want to just spend a bit of time on, on data accuracy and particularly on this, this second point here. Chris, around reps not kind of putting up their side of the bargain of updating CRM and making sure things are at the right deal stage. How do you deal with that, uh, how do you try and change that behavior at a sales rep level?

Chris Lingenfelter: Well, I mean this goes back to culture is you have to be, there has to be a clear process. As a leader you need to sit with reps and have them understand the importance of this and you have to set your expectations. There's no way around it. Now there's some things that you can do within the CRM, you know, where it's not, you know, the 90s anymore where you don't have all the tools to, to force things. Right. For example, if you know there needs to be an update, you can set workflows up in like a HubSpot or salesforce that they have to enter this data to push it to the next stage. Like there's just no way around it. And then you can review that data in your kind of your weekly syncs as well. But it's really, it's a culture. Thing is reps have to understand the importance, they have to trust you. If they don't trust you, they're going to try to hide things. If they know they can't come to you when things, when you know deals are slipping or if they're falling behind or there's just negative news in the, in the, in the deal cycle, they're going to hide things. It's just human nature. Especially the bigger team that you work with, it gets easier to hide things. Now if you're a one on one team it's more, it's easier to kind of spot those. But at the end of the day the best run sales organizations, especially when you're starting from like the individual SDR to account executive, they respect leadership but that's because the leadership puts uh, clear expectations, sets clarity into why things should move to this stage versus not. And they really work with their, their individual reps of like well how can I empower you to actually move this along in deal stage? What can I do on my end? Can I give you more resources, can I give you more training with you know an SDR manager? Can I review these deals with you? They have to be able to come to you and then you're going to have cleaner data on the front end. Now from a technical standpoint, sales op standpoint is you can enforce criteria to be entered into like Salesforce HubSpot, uh, for example to where that before it even move to a deal stage and this could be buyer identified, you know, deal amount, you know, pain points actually addressed within, within the, the criteria of moving deal stages.

Richard Smith: What is it about a framework like that that is so helpful in getting more accuracy on forecasting?

Nigel Arthur: Uh yeah, obviously consistency. Everyone's using the same mechanism, everyone's asking the same questions, everyone has the same level or has the same mechanism to provide gap analysis on where the gaps are in your deals. So from the perspective Chris mentioned it before, understanding the uh, decision making process, the paper process, effectively the buying process, that could be a massive gotcha for forecast because it's all about the timing M and understanding when is it going to close. I think if everyone has got that same lens to put over their deals in conjunction with their leadership or they're empowered to do it on their own, uh back it just means that everyone has got the same propensity to view risk in their own own deal portfolio within their own pipeline. And it's a good time to call out the fact that when we're forecasting we're not questioning the integrity of the deal, we're not saying this is a bad deal, we might credit a deal with being a solid addition to our pipeline. We're questioning when it's all going to come together and when it's going to close. So the two things are quite different. And MEDPIC enables us as a qualification framework as well as a forecasting uh, framework enables us to do, do you know, make sure we've got the right deals in our pipeline but also make sure we've got a firm idea on what could possibly derail this uh, deal and stop it closing when we say we're going to close it.

Richard Smith: And then just very, very, very quickly on this, this last point I think it just very, very quick answer from M. Maybe ask Chris this given that he's got A large team and maybe deals with this problem on a, on a acute level is around prioritizing deal inspection. You know as a sales leader with a large team team you may have lots and lots of deals in play at any point. Maybe as you're coming to the end of the quarter your time and bandwidth is limited. That's just a reality of the job. So, so how do you prioritize the deals to do that deeper inspection on? Is it just based on kind of deal value or what else do you do you use to prioritize?

Chris Lingenfelter: So priority is really is big part of it is going to be deal value and then also the fit of the company. Are we actually solving problems for them? Because if we're actually solving problems for them and their problem is greater that we're solving for, it's just a higher probability of closing and it's just going to be a higher value account. If you're trying to push last minute things over, you know, into the next quarter, I would say it's also delegation is you have to have good managers. Especially if you, as you get a bigger org, you can't just do it all yourself as a revenue leader it's just impossible. Yeah, there's just too much going on and so you have to have solid managers. And this is one of the things um, where companies sometimes struggle with as they're kind of moving up and going upstream and becoming a bigger organization is you'll have leadership that still wants to hold on to every aspect and they're not delegating to experts. And so you should trust your sdo, be ADR managers, your, you know, your sales managers, head of sales, whoever it is to work through these, these, these with you. If um, you're doing it all yourself, it's going to follow through. But I would prioritize deal size and then the fit of the actual company within your icp.

Richard Smith: That's one thing that we, you know, a lot of our sales coaches here at my sales coach, Nigel included spend time working with sales leaders on is helping them coach their sales managers on how to be better at this kind of thing. As you say, it's, it's, it's sometimes it's too much to take on yourself. What I want to do is I want to put myself in the position of being the sales rep and both Nigel and Chris as my uh, as my sales leaders. What I'm going to do is I'm going to talk through my deal to Nigel and Chris and then I want them to almost kind of alternate by maybe asking me questions and maybe challenging me on certain things in my in m. My deal to help them get clarity on is this a deal that's going to close at the time that I say it well, but also seeing this as a coaching opportunity helping me to, to um, identify blind spots, maybe rethink my deal and maybe for themselves to get more clarity on things that they would find valuable as a sales leader. I'm in my one to one with Nigel and Chris and talking about this deal that I've got with Acme Tech. And so guys, uh, this deal that I've got um, I'm selling. My main contact here is the VP of Sales enablement. Um, we've got a deal value here of £20,000. The stage in the CRM is that uh, I've sent the proposal to the prospect and yeah I'm feeling very good that this is going to close end of August. This should be, this should be in full. The solution here guys is um, we're going to be doing some one to one coaching for their SDRs. Stakeholders that I've got engaged, as I said I've got a, I've got a, I've got a really strong champion here. Economic buyer I've met once, it's the CRO that was like two meetings ago. They haven't really been active in recent meetings. The business issue that we're looking to solve here, this sales team, they've got pipelining consistency, they accept that they've got a shortage of prospecting outbound skills in there in their SDR team and they've shared with me they've got a pipeline gap of 25% to what they need to achieve quota um, for the rest of this calendar year as far as competition's concerned, no competition's been shared. The only competition here is that ah, they would try and tackle this challenge internally with limited sales resources and their managers but they shared with me that they see that as a bit of a non desirable option. So. Yeah. So um, uh, Nigel, what, what are your thoughts on my deal here?

Nigel Arthur: Yes, so good, um, outline of the business issue that's fairly clear and good to see a metric in there as well to identify the extent of the problem. Just had a question around the critical event on the customer side that is tied to their problem. So you've got close date, end of quarter, uh, that's somewhat meaningless to the prospect. What's happening on their side that they need to fix this by what, when?

Richard Smith: Yeah, that's, that's a good question. I Mean, you know, they, they just shared with me that, you know, they, they would like to make a decision on this and hopefully you know, try to, for us to start working with their team at the start of next quarter. That just seemed like. I, uh, It's a good question actually. I didn't actually ask them on, you know, why specifically end of quarter. So. Yeah, they just, we just said that they would, you know, we've try and work towards that time frame him.

Nigel Arthur: Okay. Okay. And do we know the specific steps that need to happen on their side in order to place an order with us?

Richard Smith: Yeah, I, I'd say loosely, they, you know, they're gonna, as I said, they're gonna get the proposal and m. My champion said that they would, they would need a, a meeting with the, the CRO again. Um, would need to be, would need to be arranged within the next couple of weeks. From there he has to uh, he, he, he does hold budget the CRO and he said that he would, you know, this, this would, he would sign this off. That's, that's all I've got so far. Far.

Nigel Arthur: Okay, um, um, last question for me, sorry Chris, I'm, um, hogging the mic at the moment is do you have an agreed mutual action plan with your prospect?

Richard Smith: It's loose. I wouldn't say we've got anything formally in place. You know, we've just kind of got this, this verbal agreement that we um, that we need to get this meeting scheduled with the CRO. From that moment, the CRO is going to, as far as I'm aware, is going to make a decision on this and, and hence why we're, you know, working towards the end of quarter. So yeah, nothing, nothing, nothing formal as, as far as a mutual action plan.

Nigel Arthur: Okay, no further questions. Uh, your witness, Chris.

Chris Lingenfelter: Thanks, Nigel. So I guess my first question would be is I see here that the value of the contract we have at £20,000, but have we tied how much revenue that 25% gap represents with them?

Richard Smith: Yeah, I did actually get that. Um, the uh, 25% is, is the equivalent of £1.5 million in revenue for, for them.

Nigel Arthur: Okay.

Chris Lingenfelter: And have they, I guess, have they elaborate elaborated on, you know, what happens if they don't hit this goal that did the additional 25% to achieve quota.

Richard Smith: They didn't elaborate. I just got the sense that it was a, it was a problem. But yeah, as far as like, as far as like knock on impact, we, yeah, they didn't share that. I just got the sense that it was something that they didn't, um, Wasn't a good. Wasn't a good thing to happen in their world.

Nigel Arthur: Okay.

Chris Lingenfelter: Okay. And it has. I know you haven't met with the CRO. What you've only met. How long ago was it the last time you met with the Croat?

Richard Smith: Yeah, it was like. It was like a month ago. You know, uh, he joined the second meeting, I met the VP of sales name and CRO joined the second meeting. I've since met the VP of sales name and twice since then, which has really been kind of like going through the proposal, reshaping things on the proposal. But yeah, it was roughly a month ago.

Chris Lingenfelter: Is the CRO signing off on this deal or is the VP of, uh, sales enablement going to be the one leading it from here?

Richard Smith: The vps sales namement's really the kind of the project owner of this, but the CRO is the person who will be. Be, uh, he'll be signing this off.

Chris Lingenfelter: Okay. Okay. And I guess my last question would be is what other processes have to happen once. Once the CRO gives buy in, it's moving forward. Is there. What's the paper process?

Richard Smith: Yeah, I mean, as. As far as I'm aware, they just said that, you know, the CRO would be reviewing and signing the contract. Nothing around, like, you know, legal teams have been mentioned, albeit I haven't pressed them on that or asked them specifically around that.

Chris Lingenfelter: Okay, well, that's the end of my questions.

Richard Smith: Nigel, schedule. Um, to what degree is based on what, you know, is this a deal that you'll be forecasting?

Nigel Arthur: Um, good pipeline, no forecast.

Chris Lingenfelter: Okay.

Richard Smith: Chris, any difference in opinion?

Chris Lingenfelter: Same conclusion here.

Richard Smith: All right. Very, very, very strong there. And again, I think that's a good exercise to showcase sales rep coming with lots of details, some good news. As Nigel, you said, you know, good pipeline, opportunity, but is, uh, there's still so many question marks and issues to the, to the. To the point that, that you were very hard. No, we. I would not be submitting this in my. In my forecast.

Tom Boston: Thanks for listening. There's more where that came from, so don't forget to like and subscribe. Our mission at my sales coach is to help revenue leaders survive sales by building elite sales teams, fixing their win rates, lifting quarter attainment, and coaching their teams better. Go and check out our website@, uh, mysalescoach.com to find out how we're supporting leaders like you right now.