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As a general comment, business forecasting or pipeline management is an area that companies appear to struggle with - particularly those in the tertiary sector including advisory and [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] consultancy services. Many set an annual budget with targets that can appear [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] to be based on arbitrary considerations (e.g. we did X last year, therefore we should do X + 10% this year). Some businesses are becoming smarter and using a three month look-ahead. This is seen as positive behaviour, but still often results in a "we hit" or "we missed" budget targets for that quarter. A question, however, should be "how good are those forecasts?" For example, a business that sets itself a ?100 [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] K budget/target for the next quarter, would be very pleased with itself if the result three months later was ?200 K; but this demonstrates very poor forecasting.

Why not set a KPI relating to the accuracy of the budget/pipeline forecast? This would give an insight into [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] the reliability and assurances that can be placed on the forecasting process and could be expressed as a simple percentage of variance. Very simply, [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] the lower the variance, the better the forecasting process and the more [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] reliability the business can place on forecasting to kick start processes such as an increased sales drive (if actual performance is looking poor), or the search for additional resources (if the performance is looking over budget). I recently had such a discussion with the MD of an environmental consultancy - who are part of a very large group (in the top 50 worlds biggest companies). They have some very good and well defined business metrics and KPIs which are all condensed on a [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] monthly basis to an A3 "paper size" format. I noted that they had added one since my last visit, namely a three- month pipeline forecast and suggested that they look at setting a metric to measure the accuracy of the forecast. He smiled and said "Group are thinking about this one!"

So, has anyone nailed this process? Well, my champions are a management consultancy, where the MD is [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] so keyed into the proposal process [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] and likelihood of wins and losses that their three-month forecast has consistently [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] been +/-1.5% of actual performance for several years. Initially when they [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] commenced the process, they had high variance, but over time they honed their forecasting process, part of which involved adopting the principles of the Miller Heiman approach to strategic selling - basically understanding their client base and knowing which proposals to focus on in terms of their likelihood of [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] success.
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