Let’s Not Confuse Pipeline Trends with Individual Opportunities

By Tibor Shanto
Data-driven models in sales can be a double-edged sword.  While they do help create focus, especially across large swaths of data and opportunities, they also have limitations. Especially in how they may limit or prevent us from understanding and winning any given individual opportunity. These models are great, in context, as indicators and validation. Let’s not confuse pipeline trends with individual opportunities.
There is no doubt that exploring statistics from a large population of deals and buyers can provide valuable insights. Stats that help sellers understand buyers’ motivations, propensity to act, likely responses, and more. But these are indicators of secular trends in buying, not hard uniformity applied to your entire pipeline. We need to understand opportunities based on their own merit systematically. More importantly, we need to ensure that we know the specifics of each deal and move based on empirical attributes, not statistical patterns. Making sure we