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Record W2991821292

Taming the volatile sales cycle

2006· article· de· W2991821292 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Robert B. Miller

Bibliographic record

VenueMIT Sloan management review · 2006
Typearticle
Languagede
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicBig Data and Business Intelligence
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsRoller coasterFunnelVolatility (finance)RevenueBusinessQuarter (Canadian coin)PrioritizationMarketingEconomicsFinanceEngineering
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Every sales cycle has some degree of inherent volatility. A big customer could, for instance, go bankrupt or a major deal could fall through. But there?s one type of volatility that many executives seem to think is a kind of natural law: At the beginning of every quarter, sales tend to falter; at the end, they often surge. This roller coaster can be a huge problem when major deals fail to materialize at the end of the quarter, leaving a shortfall. According to the author, such kinks in the sales cycles can be smoothed out, but doing so requires a fundamental change in how sales activities are prioritized. The typical sales process is like a funnel: At the bottom are the deals that are nearest to being closed; in the middle are other prospects in the works; and above are numerous promising leads. Companies typically work their funnels from the bottom up. After all, why not concentrate on the surest opportunities first and leave the less certain ones for last? But that prioritization strategy is the fundamental cause of the sales roller coaster. The author of this article argues that for a more continuous ? and predictable ? revenue stream, firms should prioritize the three areas of the funnel in the following way: bottom, above and then middle.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Scholarly communication, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.280
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.021

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.032
GPT teacher head0.268
Teacher spread0.236 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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