The most common view about sales processes is that probabilities should be attached to sales stages. It makes sense: as you move forward, complete relevant activities, and tick off your exit criteria, the probability of closing the deal should increase.

Here’s the truth: probability management gives a comforting feeling of control. It’s helpful for transactional business and for sales leaders with a full pipeline who can work the numbers. However, probabilities won’t help reps hunting strategic deals. They simply don’t have enough opportunities in play each quarter to play with numbers.

Still, they need to commit to a specific number early in the quarter. This is how ultimate resp do it.

Great reps leave probabilities for Managers:

Great sales leaders have a solid, value-based management system to assess how much of the pipeline in current quarter will close and how much of the pipeline created in quarter will close based on historical numbers.

Their sales process is not set in stone and may be adapted according to marketing input and insights from the field. Their vision of the market and business acumen may have led to the creation of various versions of their sales process depending on GTM, account tiers or opportunity amount.

Creativity and innovation is for deals engineering and sales strategies. When it comes to forecasting and opportunities management, sales discipline applies. This is the cornerstone of their forecasting system. This is the prerequisite of applying forecasting formulas where probabilities dictate forecast categories, which in turn define their forecast numbers. Forecast formulas include namely:

• Factored Pipeline: this the opportunities amount multiplied by the probability to close.
• Maturity pipeline: this the factored pipeline with only opportunities at 50% and beyond
• Do’s and Don’ts: these are the sum of the deals that will close based on data and business acumen, not gut feeling.

Great reps have their own management system:

Great reps also have a solid opportunity management system too. However, they don’t care about marketing metrics and probabilities. They don’t worry about marketing reminders for opportunities stuck at 10% probability.

Instead, they maintain a parallel forecast -either literally or in their heads- drawing on a deep understanding of diverse sales techniques and sales methodologies. For them, a healthy pipeline is not a neat funnel. A strong pipeline looks rather like a galaxy of opportunities at 10% probability, until they decide to move them to 50% and commit to close them.

Their secret sauce is that high value activities that require commitment to invest time and resources and active participations from customers are stacked in the early stage of the sales process. They are conducted together with the customer and include a mix of tactical and strategic conversations, namely:

• Getting pain admitted and access to power granted.
• Sharing a mutual plan that involves all stakeholders and getting it signed off.
• Building a case for change and assessing capacity to change.
• Evaluating competitive threats and selecting a sales strategy.
• Securing funding and engaging decision-makers on options.

Great reps are change-agents:

Great reps have no issue completing the activities and transitions of a traditional sales process. They will as far as they make sense. Since they have their own forecasting and opportunities management system, you may notice that the boxes that belong to the advanced stages of your sales process are ticked early.

For instance, offer benefits and tangible impact are discussed early with people who can buy. Pain, for sure, but also Power and Value are non-negotiable signals that may be adjusted further but belong to the early stage of the hard qualification management system that is hard wired in their brain.

What great reps do remarkably well is checking deals health through customer execution on the key deliverables of the Mutual Plan. Their assessment is not only based on those deliverables but on their own evaluation of the customer team’s dynamics. They check valid signals that consensus is created through :

• The active participation of each stakeholder.
• The quality of their interactions.
• Their ability to explore solutions to obstacles that stand in the way of the decision process.

Hence the need to turn your exit criteria not only into key deliverables of your sales process but into customer valuable interactions.

Conclusion :

If you are in a super competitive market or focus on accounts targeting, forget about linear sales processes based on probabilities that are supposed to reflect deals advancement.

First, you may not enjoy the number of opportunities that allow you to rely on probabilities to close. Second, winning strategic deals has little to do with completing activities at each stage. Activities should serve as a guideline to coach customers on the sales process and measure their capacity to change.

This is what great reps, consciously or unconsciously, do. Take a moment to understand their approach and acknowledge sales is not only about funnel like pipelines and probabilities. The only risk you take is to focus on real opportunities and win more.

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