Two Ways to Manage Uncertainty

[image error]As I speak with sales leaders and their teams, a common theme emerges – uncertainty.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about the North American market (upcoming elections, continued fiscal and monetary policies, regulatory changes), the European market (ongoing negotiations within the European Union), or the Asian/Pacific market (evolving growth forecasts from China and emerging market countries), the environment is one of constantly, and rapidly, changing expectations for the future.  Indeed, in many cases, an answer reached today seems to yield additional questions tomorrow.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that companies are, “widening the range of their profit, revenue or other projections,” in response to this global economic uncertainty.

In this more fluid environment, we are still responsible for leading our businesses and, at the end of the year, hitting our number. We also have to continue to report to our internal peers where we think the year is going to net out.

The problem is many organizations seek to solve this uncertainty by mining through data they already have. The thoughts here are that the truth is out there somewhere in the data – we just have to go out and find it. Unfortunately, unless we’re starting from scratch, many of these analytical ventures yield little more than what we already know.

In response, we have seen leading companies focus on this problem from a different angle.  Rather than trying to generate better certainty from the information they already have, they seek to gather better information that improves their opportunity to generate this certainty.

Specifically, here are two ways to help manage as best as possible the effects caused by uncertainty:

Gathering Customer-Generated Information During the Sales Process – We cannot rely upon internally generated information when tracking our sales pipeline, especially when reporting to internal peers in finance and operations how we are tracking against our own expectations.   Instead, we have seen several companies begin to track customer actions rather than our activities.  These customer actions are clearly defined and demonstrate a customer’s moving forward in their buying process rather than our internal sales activities.


Leveraging the Market of Information – This is tapping the collective intelligence of the people who are closest to the market – our sales force. Here we’ve seen companies do this in two ways.  The first, developed by NBC Universal, sought to gather group feedback through their CRM system by embedding social media platforms into the system creating a more seamless way for their reps to enter and track this “unstructured” information. The second is by using Prediction Markets inside the sales organization. These markets, like Intrade, ask individual to “bet” on the likelihood of certain outcomes, resulting in the “best guess” your organization can make on a future event (like a new product launch).

While no one can predict the future with 100% accuracy, these two methods can help to better manage the amount of uncertainty there is today in the market.

SEC Members, read more about how to improve sales predictions in a volatile business environment. Also, review our key findings on social selling and prediction markets.