According to , most organizations are missing one essential piece of the sales puzzle: visibility into the sales pipeline. More than 60 percent of the organizations Ventana polled say they plan to invest in sales analytics in 2012, meaning that finding sales insights hidden in "Big Data" will be a top priority this year.

There's a trap here, though.

Gaining visibility into the sales pipeline is meaningless if your organization doesn't have a formal sales process in place. "Companies spend far too much time trying to normalize their existing sales data not realizing that historical sales only tells you what you sold, not what opportunities exist," says Melissa Scheppele, CIO of . "Today, forecasting is based on a sales person in field saying 'I'm going to close deal.' Those falsehoods trickle up."

Before we rush to blame sales teams for bogus forecasts, it's important to step back and consider an important contributing factor: the personality of successful sales people. Sales managers want optimistic sales people. They want a team that believes it will close a high percentage of open leads. They stress positive thinking. That kind of attitude can certainly translate into success. What an enthusiastic attitude doesn't translate into, however, is accurate forecasting.

Many sales teams have access to tools that are supposed to provide visibility, but there's no guarantee that the sales force will use them -- or if they do, that they will use them properly.