A forecast you can argue with

Ask a board what its sales forecast is and you will get a number. Ask how that number was arrived at and the room usually goes quiet.

The number came from a spreadsheet, which came from a CRM, which came from individual salespeople estimating a probability against a deal. Somewhere in that chain the number stopped being evidence and became a feeling, and nobody can say exactly where.

That matters because a forecast nobody can reconstruct is a forecast nobody can argue with, and a forecast nobody can argue with is not a management tool. It is a ritual.

The three things that make a forecast real

You do not need a new system. Almost every business already has more tooling than it uses. You need three agreements.

One, a shared definition of a qualified opportunity

Not a stage name. A definition, written down, in language your team would use, that two people can apply to the same deal and reach the same answer.

The usual test is whether it references the customer's behaviour rather than yours. "We have sent a proposal" is about you and tells you almost nothing. "They have told us what problem this solves, who signs, and by when" is about them, and predicts.

Most pipelines shrink by a third the week this is agreed. That is not a loss. That third was never going to close, and you were forecasting it.

Two, dates that mean something

A close date should be the date the customer expects to make the decision, taken from the customer, not the date that makes the quarter work.

The simplest discipline here is the most effective: a deal whose close date has moved twice gets discussed on its own, in front of everyone, without blame. It is remarkable how quickly dates become honest when moving one is visible rather than silent.

Three, a weekly review that is about deals, not about people

The review most businesses run is a performance conversation disguised as a pipeline meeting. Everyone reports their number, everyone is slightly defensive, nothing about any actual deal changes.

The one that works goes deal by deal on the things that will close this quarter, and asks a different question: what do we not know about this one, and who is finding out by when. It is slower and less comfortable, and it is the only version that changes an outcome rather than recording it.

Why this is worth a month of unglamorous work

None of the above is clever. It is the sort of thing everyone agrees with in principle and very few businesses actually run, because it is dull and it makes the numbers look worse before it makes them better.

But a forecast you can argue with does three things that a list of hopes cannot.

1. It tells you where to spend the last four weeks of a quarter, which is the only moment where effort still moves the number. 2. It survives diligence. A buyer who can reconstruct your forecast from evidence pays differently from one who cannot. 3. It makes coaching possible. You cannot coach against a definition of good that does not exist.

> The purpose of a forecast is not to be right. It is to be wrong early enough that you can do something about it.

Where to start on Monday

Take the last twenty deals you lost. Read the notes, or if there are no notes, ring five of the customers and ask. Then look at what stage each of them was in when it died.

If most of them died in stages you were counting as likely, you do not have a forecasting problem. You have a qualification problem, and the forecast is just where it becomes visible.