Everything Looked Fine Until the Quarter Closed
Recently ran into an interesting forecasting problem.
The pipeline looked healthy, plenty of opportunities were sitting in active stages, and the numbers suggested a decent quarter ahead. But when we started digging into the deals behind those numbers, a different picture emerged.
Sales was moving opportunities through the pipeline even when buyers hadn't meaningfully engaged beyond receiving a proposal. Finance was building forecasts based on those pipeline numbers, while marketing was focused on lead volume. Everyone was looking at the same data, but drawing very different conclusions from it.
The biggest issue was what I'd call "ghost deals." Prospects would go silent for weeks and still sit in the active pipeline. On paper everything looked healthy. At quarter end, not so much.
What finally helped was paying less attention to activity metrics and more attention to stage-to-stage conversion rates. We also realized different teams had completely different definitions of what counted as a qualified opportunity, which created a lot of data inconsistencies.
After standardizing those definitions and cleaning up the pipeline, forecast accuracy became much more reliable and the numbers started reflecting what was actually happening in the business.
Curious how other teams handle stale opportunities. Do you automatically close deals after a certain period of inactivity, or is it usually a judgment call by sales managers?