How important is grassroots involvement in sales forecasting?
JM: Forecasts cannot be open to interpretation. The whole point of a forecast is that it’s supposed to give you guideposts for what your actions are, how you allocate your resources, what you spend your time focusing on. At the very base of that, you need to involve the person who is out there actually driving the sale. So we include everybody who sells in that sales forecast. Obviously, each person’s interpretation of where they are in the sales cycle is different. So we’ve established milestones throughout the sales cycle–all the way from first contact to contract and everything in between. Those are the markers; there are about 10 stages that we look at. That way, there’s no interpretation: We ask where they are, and they tell us what milestone they’ve reached. We use MSCRM to keep track and to keep score. SPJ: What are the potential consequences of inaccurate forecasts or missed expectations? JM: You can argue about what killed the whole dot-com era, but at the heart of it was tha
