Can you really trust the revenue in your pipeline?
Let’s start with a typical scenario, one you’ll all no doubt recognise:
The CRM is up to date, the opportunity qualified, the meeting went well, and the deal looks good to close this quarter. BUT, 6 weeks later it’s slipped or gone quiet, and the realisation hits: a deal that you expected to win has slipped away.
Every revenue leader has a version of this deal. In fact, you’ll have deals playing out just like this in your pipeline right now. The question isn’t whether this is happening; it’s whether you can spot it happening, and more importantly, know what to do about it.
Two problems with one cause
Sales leaders feel two very clear pressures: to grow revenue and to deliver forecast certainty. The scenario outlined above fails on both counts. It was in the forecast, so the forecast was wrong. It could have been won, so revenue was lost.
But the reason it failed lay in plain sight. The buyer wasn’t as confident in the purchase as everyone on the selling side believed.
What a healthy-looking pipeline is really hiding
Look at what most pipeline indicators actually measure, and a clear correlation appears; i.e. each one describes the deal from the seller’s side. None of them tells you whether the people buying are confident enough to make a decision.
That matters because most deals aren’t lost to a competitor. Research based on 2.5 million recorded sales conversations found that 40–60% of lost deals ended in no decision. Medium to high indecision appeared in 87% of deals. When indecision was medium, the win rate was 30%. When it was high, it dropped to just 6%.
Even the most well-qualified deal can be silently heading to a loss, because whilst qualification can pinpoint a deal worth pursuing, it cannot tell you if the buying group is ready to commit. So, even when the pipeline says “on track”, the buyers are somewhere else entirely. We call that the confidence gap. It’s the distance between what your indicators suggest and what your buyers are ready to do.
And it’s a costly gap to fall into.
Most conversations about this gap focus on forecasting, and the forecasting problem is real. Four in five revenue teams have missed a quarterly forecast in the previous year, and more than half have missed two or more.
But a forecast miss is only the visible part. Behind every deal that slipped is a deal that might have been won if someone had spotted and course-corrected the problem sooner.
That leaves revenue on the table. Revenue that should have been won.
More pipeline doesn’t fix the problem; it compounds it
When the number is at risk, the instinct is to build more pipeline. But when the real problem is buyer confidence, that adds more deals that will stall in the same place, at greater cost. To borrow a well-used analogy, it’s like throwing more mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. Not good for certainty, not good for growth, and most certainly not good for confidence.
In fact, it can make things worse. When buyers get cold feet, 73% of salespeople go back to the start of their pitch and restate the case for change, but 84% of the time that makes losing the deal even more likely. More selling pressure doesn’t resolve a buyer’s uncertainty; it adds to it.
More pipeline also hides a consistency problem; one we’ve been calling out for years. 14% of sellers drive 80% of new-customer revenue. Your best people are generating the majority of your revenue. The challenge is understanding what they do differently and making those high-performing behaviours consistent across the rest of the team, rather than simply giving everyone more opportunities..
For businesses in markets with a limited number of customers, such as the media and events industry, there’s a further constraint still. Because when the total addressable market is small, growth relies heavily on converting more of the opportunities already in the pipeline.
Buyer confidence links winning more with knowing more
Buyer confidence is what both revenue growth and forecast certainty depend on. B2B customers with high decision confidence are 10 x more likely to make a high-quality, low-regret purchase. Confident buyers decide, whereas uncertain ones delay, retreat to the status quo, or go quiet.
When sales teams can see where confidence is draining while the deal is still live, two things immediately change:
- Win rates and revenue growth: Sellers can act while the outcome can still be influenced, for example, bring in the stakeholder who isn’t aligned, deal with a risk or challenge nobody has raised, or put forward a solution that speaks to every member of the buying group
- Forecast accuracy: Leaders can judge a deal on whether the buyer is ready to move, not just on whether the salesperson thinks it will close.
The opportunity isn’t predicting which deals will close based on seller optimism. It’s helping them to stop losing deals they should win by ensuring that every action is designed to build buyer confidence.
Top tip: for more on why buyer confidence should sit at the centre of how you sell, see our blog on what being buyer-centric really means.
Where AI can help build buyer confidence
AI can help here, but only if it’s aimed at the right problem. Tools that summarise calls or report past activity tell you what happened. That saves time, but it doesn’t help a seller decide what to do in a live deal.
AI is useful when it helps people understand what is happening from the buyer’s side and act on it while it still matters. To achieve this, it must be:
- A tool your sales team actually want to use: built for the seller first, an ally helping sellers understand buyer confidence, not a scorecard reading the seller.
- Prescriptive, not descriptive: reading the state of a buyer’s confidence inside a live deal and prescribing the next best move
- Live in the workflow: within a CRM, constantly cleansing, updating and enriching in real time
- Grounded in a proven methodology: The technology is only as good as the framework underneath it.
For 16 years, Flume’s methodology has focused on what drives confident buying decisions. THEA, powered by Flume’s Buyer Confidence Engine™, is being developed to bring that methodology into live deals.
Top tip: Take a read of our new whitepaper ‘The AI Adoption Gap ’ to explore why sales teams are buying AI and still losing the deals they should win.
Ready to build more trust into your pipeline?
What does the confidence gap look like inside a real opportunity, and what could have been done about it?
In our upcoming webinar, ‘More revenue. More certainty. What drives both?’ we’ll investigate a real opportunity – what the pipeline indicators said, what the buyers were experiencing, and what that means for win rates and the forecast.
Register for your place today.