Recipe: Investigate pipeline and forecast fluctuations

In the Analytics > Trends report, look for large blips which indicate something going awry.

For example, here we can see that we doubled the amount of deals in Commit around January/February, which then disappear in the middle of February:

In other words, there were a lot of deals in pipeline that didn't get booked. The pipeline size doubled by $200K, and then it disappeared. You'll want to investigate those deals that slipped.

Go to the Analytics > Changes report, and filter the time range to look at the same 'blip' here.

In our example, we can see that indeed there were a lot of deals (over $1M) that were pushed out:

Triage the deals that caused the 'blip'.

1. Filter the Changes report to just Commit deals in order to focus on the most critical deals at that time.

   In our example, we can see that 4 deals were pushed out of Commit.

2. Scroll down to look at those 4 deals at a high-level.

   

   In our example, we can see:

   • All 4 deals had changes to their close date, explaining the change

   • The Aventine deal has a warning on it, and not a lot of activity

   • The Indis deal is the biggest ($80k) but is still in Validation

   So, you'll want to take a closer look at the Aventine and Indis deals.

3. Click the deal name to review the deal from within the Changes report.

   

   Use "Ask anything" to answer your questions about the deals and review each deal's activity in order to reach a decision on how to best handle those deals.

   • Do you want to stop wasting time and kill one or both of those deals?

   • Or do you want to let those deals ride out because they are legit? Should you rethink the strategy on them?