If you’re responsible for sales performance, you know your chances at success are shrouded with uncertainties. Uncertainties create risks. In B2B sales, most risks are downside risks; risks that something bad will unexpectedly happen.

In some sales organizations, uncertainties + risks have created situations so bizarre it’s hard to imagine bright people participating in them. Learned this week, for instance, of a large international firm that’s now conducting sales forecast reviews three times a week.

Surely we can do better.

In other situations where performance is shrouded in uncertainties, high performance is being pursued by proactively managing risks. There are three patterns to how it’s being done:

• Process performance is measured in ways that reveal how practices impact results
• Resulting measures are used to eliminate bad practices [rather than find best practices]
• There’s a focus on accelerated learning, using trial and error, to figure things out as you go

In insurance, for instance, the focus is on using analytics to replace the fog of uncertainty with calibrated risks. Use knowledge of your exposure to downside risks to reduce the likelihood they’ll occur and reduce the severity of their impacts on results.

The keys to doing so = [understand outcomes] + [calibrate the frequency + severity of impact on outcomes of negative events] + [use your new views of risks to actively manage them down]

In professional sports, the focus is on using analytics to deal with uncertainty by being wrong less often.

In firms with a culture of analytics and ‘big data’, the focus is on letting experimentation replace strategy. It’s about quickly reducing your odds of getting things wrong. It’s what agile firms live and breathe today.

It requires [more focus on causation than correlation] + [looking for patterns from within the chaos] + [lots of small, fast, tests] + [changing the way learning occurs with more emphasis on discovering things in the flow of doing things]

Taleb says the value of such practices is in lowering the risks of being skewered by uncertainties.

This occurs when organizations [learn from trial + error] + [focus on reducing risks rather than trying to make unpredictable situations more predictable] +  [focus on eliminating bad practices rather than finding best practices]

In my view, it’s time to de-risk B2B sales performance using similar analytics-enabled, learning focused, approaches. Have you tried such an approach? If so, what was your biggest challenge in doing so? How has such an approach affected your sales performance? Let the conversation begin.

John is the founder and CEO of innovative information inc., makers of Amacus. His firm provokes improved B2B sales productivity by helping sales teams see + improve the buyer value of their sales practices.

Follow John at @jcousineau.