3 ideas
Qualify every deal against Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identified pain, Champion, and Competition — if any element is unknown, the deal is not qualified and the gap is the next action. The discipline forces reps to surface what they don't know rather than forecasting on optimism, because deals are lost in the unknowns.
A true champion has power and personal interest in your success, and is tested by whether they will give you access, information, and advocacy when you are not in the room. Someone who likes you but cannot get you a meeting with the economic buyer is a coach, not a champion, and mistaking one for the other is how forecasts collapse.
Buyers only fund solutions to pain that connects to a quantified business metric an executive is measured on, so reps must convert vague problems into dollar figures the economic buyer cares about. Without this metric linkage, the deal lacks the financial justification needed to survive budget scrutiny and gets deprioritized.