It’s never fun to give up on a sale. After all, a deal you take out of your pipeline represents a loss of what could have been -- an additional customer, extra money in your paycheck, and moving closer to meeting quota.
But as much as it sucks to mark a deal as closed-lost, it’s even worse to let one languish in your pipeline indefinitely. Because leaving a deal that will realistically never close in your forecast artificially raises your projections and makes them less accurate.
If you have multiple dead deals in your pipeline, the negative effects balloon into something more -- missing quota because you’re counting on them to come in, getting discouraged when month after month, those deals continue sitting in your forecast, and losing credibility with your sales team and manager when you continue to miss your own projections.
So yeah … keeping deals in your pipeline that shouldn’t be there causes a lot of problems. And yet it’s also true that sometimes prospects just go dark. Should you closed-lost a deal even if the prospect was a great fit and seemed interested, but disappeared without warning? read more here