Your Career-Killing Hopecast Trap

I recently posted an instagram of a modified slide I showed a while back. The session sought to raise a salesteam’s Forecast accuracy.

Early in my career I encountered the term “hopecast”.

If your precious spreadsheet was so labelled, jibes and barbs flew your way.

It referred to a forecast floating firmly in dreamland.

At the time, I embellished the point by talking about different types of hope.

Many such a taxonomy exists around the psycho-web.

Such as these seven kinds of hope; inborn, chosen, borrowed, bargainers, unrealistic, false, mature.

I combined some along these lines with ones I made-up, relative to people and players specific to the team in question. Which did bring higher retention.

Especially when dropping some of the more famous amusing quotes on the hazard of forecasting;

“I never make predictions. I never have. And I never will.”

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

The point was, when we major on gut-feel, our own perceived closeness of relationship, or any level of construed ‘fit’, projected funnel progression basically becomes groundless guesswork.

There are a number of proven ways to firm this up.

And one of them is never adhering to the stipulations of your current monthly flavour of recording system.

The best alignment of actual-to-expected occurs when you know that your process is being duly followed.

The half-dozen events that happen on a bid which when they do, practically guarantee the order.

In my particular field example above, I also evoked a favourite ‘sweet ‘n sour’ view of ideal customer profile. Not with the usual demographics, but psychographics more to the fore (I’ve also blogged on the wonder of AIOs before).

This is a total winner of approach too.

Also, the qualify-out prism is the one through which over-achieving salespeople view their world.

Any line on your precious pipeline must justify its position there. Be tough. And the rewards will flow.