As the Chief Executive of your company, you need to be confident in your team’s demand and Sales forecast, and your team’s plan to achieve that forecast.  All too often though, CEOs find that the confidence that their Sales and marketing leaders expressed when they shared the marketing plan and numbers for the next year did not convert into the expected Sales results.

The reasons for missing the goals outlined and agreed in the plans and forecast can be complex and Sales and marketing virtually always blame the other, but the bottom line in that missed results are just not acceptable.

Fundamentally, the process of setting and achieving marketing and sales goals will be high risk if the emotional aspects of the process are allowed to fester.

Marketing is a long game, and business-to-business (B2B) marketing qualification cycles can stretch over several years, while the B2B sales cycle can also extend over many months.  This means that much of the pipeline that your Sales teams will have in any given year will have been nurtured over several years.

Knowing exactly what is in your long-term pipeline, where each item is in the qualification process, and applying both company and industry models, can give you a very clear view of the business you can expect to close in the next year, and it can also give you insights into what changes you can make to the plan to accelerate longer term leads (or throttle them based upon Sales capacity).

Pricing, promotions, campaign pace and flow, channel mix, changes in investment, refocusing on specific parts of your product mix or customer base can all play significant roles in bringing more qualified deals to your Sales team in a planned specific time frame and in predicting when prospects will make a decision; with tuning, they can also project and increase the expected deal size and win rate.

B2B³ will provide you with a deep analysis of your forecast and supporting plan and advise on how you can tune your marketing and Sales mix to increase the health of your pipeline and increase your confidence in your team’s ability to achieve your forecast.  Our forecasting performance in each of our last three major engagements exceeded expectations and we’d love to discuss those results and how we could do the same for your organization.