Where is the best place to start improving the accuracy of pipeline and forecasting reports (currently off by at least 20% each quarter)?

If your pipeline and forecasting reports are only out by 20% each quarter better here is my advice on how to give them surgery:

- MEDDPICC for Qualification Rollout: This framework helps standardize how your teams are qualifying opportunities amongst everyone. This brings an extra level of discipline to your sales process and means you only move in well-qualified deals, making forecasts more robust.

- Revisit Your Opportunity Stages Again — Once more, make sure you have defined your opportunity stages in Salesforce clearly so that it is well understood and used consistently by every sales team member. If this is misaligned, your forecasts are out of whack.

- Analyzing Historic Data: go back to previous quarter and see where differences happened. Is there a particular stage known to be consistently overestimated? Leverage these insights to reset or recalibrate your forecasting assumptions.

– Weighted Probabilities: Rather than only caring about opp stages use more reasonable probability percentages for each stage that develops based on prior win rates. It puts some life into your forecasts, and accurately reflects the probability of converting deals.

– Weekly Pipeline Reviews: Schedule regular calls to review the pipeline in great detail. In this way, it will pick up any discrepancies or apparently merrily deals before they affect your metrics.

- Use Advanced Forecasting Tools: You can use advanced forecasting features on Salesforce or third part tools that offer predicative analytics to increase accuracy.

With the MEDDPICC approach and a lot of rigour in taking care of data hygiene, tightening this qualification process would definitely lead to better pipeline accuracy & hence forecasting as well.