I could never tell which half of the forecast was real.
I am Robert Ottley. I spent twenty years in enterprise sales, managing teams and taking the forecast into the board. Not once could I say, with any confidence, which of those deals would actually land. TellMyCRM is the thing I wanted on every one of those Mondays and could not buy.
I was in a pipeline review. A rep was telling me a deal had moved again, for the third time. The CEO turned to me and asked what I thought. I wanted to say I thought it was all rubbish. But I had nothing to back it up, except instinct. It was uncomfortable.
Robert Ottley, founderI was never lied to. I was working from a record that had stopped being current, and I had no way of telling which parts.
My reps were not lazy. It was a design problem.
Every one of them stopped working. After every single conversation, I was asking them to do this:
What I was asking for
- Finish the meeting, the call, or the drive.
- Open a different application.
- Find the right record.
- Type what just happened into a form.
What I was actually asking for
- Unpaid admin that helps them close nothing.
- Every answer in that form is MY answer, for MY meeting, not theirs.
- So it gets done last, in a rush, the night before I ask for it.
- And what gets typed then is the shape of a deal, not the deal.
As long as the rep has to stop, open the CRM and fill in a form, no policy fixes it.
The rep does not go to the CRM. What happened reaches it.
A voice note in the car park, the reply they are writing in Outlook, the Teams call that has just ended. I have been the rep whose Friday it ruins, and the director whose forecast depends on that rep having bothered. So every decision in it had to be worth something to both. Three of them I would not ship without, and the fourth was a bonus I did not expect.
The rep gets more back than it takes
Emails and meetings log themselves, so that admin is gone. What arrives instead is theirs: the brief before a meeting, the follow-up already written, a nudge drafted when a customer goes quiet.
No change to a deal without the rep saying so
Every change to a stage, a value or a close date is read back and written only when the person who owns the deal says YES. A CRM that fills itself in with guesses is the same problem, only faster.
The director can defend every figure
Every number in a brief or a board pack adds up from deals I can name and open, and every fact links to the email or meeting it came from, because “the customer is keen” is not evidence.
The bonus: coaching that works
Once the CRM shows what really happened, you can see what each rep does on the deals they win and the deals they lose. So you can coach each of them on the one thing that will help them hit their number, and see whether it changed.
If you cannot defend a forecast line by line, it is worse than having none, because everyone plans around it anyway. That is why I built TellMyCRM.
TellMyCRM is a product of bSMART-AI Ltd (No. 16802784).
I am Robert Ottley, founder of bSMART-AI Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (No. 16802784), building applied AI for businesses with real work to do. TellMyCRM is the sales one.
TellMyCRM is built in the United Kingdom and your data is held in the EU. What it reads, what it writes and what it does not do are set out on Integrations & trust.
Questions, or want to tell me I have got something wrong? bob.ottley@bsmart-ai.com. It comes to me.
“If you run a sales team, you already suspect some of your pipeline is not real. I built this so you can find out which, before you have to stand up and present it.”Robert Ottley, Founder, bSMART-AI Ltd
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