It’s Friday morning, and you’re thinking about Monday’s management meeting – the one where you’ll be presenting your mid-quarter sales forecast to the executive team.

You’ve just sent another reminder to the sales team to update their deal information in the expensive SFA tool you installed a year ago. After chasing down a few rogue reps (who act as if they’ve never seen the tool before), you’re finally ready to run the numbers. Immediately, you see that several deals are slipping. Uh-oh.

How did this happen? What caused last week’s healthy forecast to take a turn for the worst? Are all our prospects getting squirrely at once? Are our reps falling down on the job?