On any given day, weathercasters in our area predict a 20% chance of rain. It’s a safe bet with a one in five chance of being correct.

In an industry that tends to reward “Strong Wrong” more often than “Soft Right,” the bold and the brave may tell you that they can predict your sales with amazing accuracy via their proprietary algorithms.

But like the weathercaster that falls back to “scattered showers,” what are the odds that your sales opportunities can be forecasted by the mountains of big data that are available to you today?

Ironically, the weather is actually more predictive of car sales than the predictive models you may be hearing about.

Think not? It may be time to change your Weather Channel.

For sales teams in the Midwest and central US, they know that hail storms bring buyers. Most typically and quite extensively, hurricane arrivals drive away purchases before and upon arrival. Then the storms actually help to consolidate years of business into weeks of frenzied buying for stores along the Gulf Coast and on the Atlantic seaboard when consumers need replacement units for their flooded out cars, trucks and SUVs.

Sure we all want a rainmaker on the sales front, but be ever more cautious with bold proclamations on predictive sales modeling. Think it through—what are the odds?