If you want a laugh, go and look at what your CRM says you'll close at the end of the financial year. We're all going to be rich!
That's where opportunities go when a rep doesn't quite know what to do with them - shoved out to December, to be worried about later. It means the far end of your pipeline is mostly wishful thinking, and it shows the moment you try to turn CRM data into a sales budget.
So before you build a plan on top of it, a few things are worth thinking about.
First, horizon. Your CRM is typically useful for forecasting the next quarter or so - close enough that the deals are real and someone has actually looked at them recently. Push much past that and the quality drops off quickly. For anything beyond the near term you're better off planning from capacity - how many salespeople you have, and how much each can realistically close - than from a pipeline nobody has tidied since spring (more on that in my sales planning for SaaS post).
Second, whether to weight by probability. For opportunities you've got two options - it's either in or out, or you take the CRM's percentages and say this one's worth 40%, that one 80%, and total up the weighted figure. Which is right depends enormously on your sector. If you're doing a healthy volume of deals, weighting smooths things out and the law of averages does its job. But in a lumpy sector - handful of big deals a year - it's close to useless. A 60% deal doesn't half-happen; you win it or you don't, and averaging just gives you a number that will never actually occur.
If you do weight, two things worth checking. One, where the percentages came from - most teams pick round numbers that feel about right and never test them; a stage should only be worth 50% if roughly half the deals reaching it actually close. If you've got the history, calibrate against it. Two, whether the deals have actually moved - something sat in "Proposal" for six months isn't a 50% deal, it's a stalled one, and probably a no. Time in stage often tells you more than the stage itself.
And all of it leans on your reps. Weighted probabilities are only as good as the discipline behind them. If your team updates them thoughtfully, lovely, and congratulations on your unicorn sales team. If they set them once and never touch them - or nudge them up near quarter-end to look keen - you're planning on numbers nobody believes anyway.
None of this makes the CRM useless. It just means being clear on what it's good for - a decent read on the next quarter, and a probability model that suits some sectors and not others.
So by all means start with the CRM. Just don't ask it to tell you something it doesn't know!