Stories / B2B Industrial
Sales Director: Forecast accuracy 60% to 92%, win rate up 14 points
A £4.1M pipeline that produced £600k, with forecasts wrong by 40% every single quarter.
- Client
- Sales Director
- Industry
- B2B Industrial
- Size
- 9 reps
- Timeframe
- 5 months
Anonymised at the client's request · figures verified · published with written permission
The situation
Deals sat in 'negotiation' for eleven months. The average deal cycle was supposedly ninety days.
Every rep forecast optimistically because nothing bad happened when they were wrong.
Manufacturing was planning capacity from that forecast, which meant the problem was expensive beyond the sales team.
What we did
- STEP 01
Wrote exit criteria for each stage
Evidence-based, not feeling-based: budget confirmed in writing, decision-maker met, procurement process mapped, date agreed. No evidence, no stage.
- STEP 02
Purged the pipeline in one session
£4.1M became £1.5M in an afternoon. Uncomfortable, honest, and the single most useful thing the team did all year.
- STEP 03
Made prospecting mandatory again
With a truthful pipeline, the gap was visible. Each rep committed to eight new qualified conversations a week and reported them on Mondays.
- STEP 04
Reviewed forecast accuracy, not just forecast
Each rep's called number versus actual, tracked and visible to the team. Accuracy became a professional point of pride within two months.
The numbers
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Forecast accuracy | 60% | 92% |
| Win rate | 17% | 31% |
| Reported pipeline | £4.1M | £2.2M (real) |
| Closed revenue/quarter | £600k | £810k |
Measured over 5 months
What didn't go to plan
Two reps found the visibility intolerable and one of them was a genuinely good salesperson. Honest measurement has a cost, and it isn't always paid by the people you'd expect.
In their words
“We deleted two point six million pounds of pipeline in an afternoon. Revenue went up the following quarter.”
Sales Director · B2B Industrial
The lesson
A pipeline full of hope is worse than an empty one — it stops you prospecting.