Decision date

The decision date is the day by which the customer promised to give you an answer. Take it from the customer's words. Your own hopes do not go in this field. Example (invented numbers): "We will decide by October 20" is a decision date. "Probably this month" is a guess, and it stays out of the field.

You get it by asking directly, usually during qualification or when you present the proposal: "By what date do you plan to decide?" In a CRM it is a date field on the deal card, separate from the task due date. If the customer gives no date, leave the field empty. An empty field tells you something too.

For example, “by October 20.”

The head of sales reads decision dates when building the forecast. Deals with a date inside the month go into the forecast. Deals with no date stay out. Once a week, look at the deals whose decision date has passed with no answer. They go first on the meeting list.

A missed decision date changes your next move. The deal is still open, but the customer's plan has changed, and you need to find out why. The seller calls, asks what changed and records the new date, again in the customer's words.

Keep it apart from two neighboring terms. The next step is your action with your date. The sales cycle is how many days deals take to close, and decision dates that keep moving stretch it. If dates keep slipping in both places, the forecast is running on wishes rather than on what customers promised.

• Filling in the date yourself. A seller who types "end of month" to make the forecast look full gives you a date nobody promised. Write only the date the customer said.
• Moving the date silently. Change it without a note and the history is gone. Add a short note each time: who moved it and why.
• Never asking. Sellers often feel the question is pushy. Start with a softer version, "When would you like this to be in place?", and work back to the decision from there.
• Confusing it with the payment date. A customer can decide on one day and pay weeks later. Track the decision here and record the expected payment separately.

By Friday, each seller opens their deals at the proposal stage and checks the decision date field. Where it is empty, the seller calls or writes to the customer and asks by what date they plan to decide. Where the date has passed, the seller asks what changed. On Monday, the head of sales reads the field for all proposal-stage deals and builds the month's forecast only from dates the customers gave. Deals with no date go on a separate list for the meeting.

CRM rules the team follows and a forecast review you can run every week.