Why Can’t I Trust My Sales Forecast?
You don’t lose revenue at the end of the month or the quarter. You lose it weeks – sometimes months – earlier.
I was thinking about this recently because there is a question I hear from CEOs and sales leaders more often than you might expect: ‘Why can’t I trust my sales forecast?’
And it is more than a fair question.
You have a CRM, your opportunities are sitting in stages, your salespeople are giving you their best estimate of what is going to close, and you probably have some version of a weekly pipeline or forecast meeting where everyone talks through the deals that are supposed to get you to the number.
And yet, somewhere in the back of your mind, there is still that uncomfortable feeling that the number might not be the number.
You have probably experienced it before. A deal that everyone expected to close suddenly moves. Another one needs another conversation, another approval or another stakeholder. A third was described as highly likely only a few weeks earlier, and now the language has changed from ‘when’ to ‘if.’
So the forecast changes.
And when that happens often enough, you start questioning the forecast, the CRM, the sales process, the salespeople and perhaps even the forecasting methodology itself.
So you halve the number and divide by two.
God forbid, you may even double it.
But I think we can look at this differently.
The forecast isn’t where the problem starts
In my book, Sales ≠ Revenue: The Five Leadership Decisions That Do, I make a fairly simple argument: revenue is a decision outcome, not a sales activity.
The same thinking applies to your forecast.
The number sitting in front of you at the end of the month or quarter is actually the result of a long chain of decisions that have already been made.
- What did the salesperson decide about the opportunity and when?
- What did the sales leader accept as evidence?
- What has the buyer actually decided and for what reason?
- What assumptions have been made about timing, budget, stakeholders or the buying process?
- What risks were challenged, and which ones were allowed to sit there because nobody really wanted to disturb the opportunity?
- And ultimately, who owns the number?
By the time an opportunity appears in a forecast, a lot has already happened. Some decisions have been made deliberately, some have been made without much thought, and some have been avoided altogether.
That is why I say your revenue is only as reliable as the decisions behind it.
If the decisions underneath the forecast are weak, unclear or based more on belief than evidence, changing the forecast process isn’t going to solve the underlying problem.
Activity can look remarkably like progress
This is one of the easiest traps for a leadership team to fall into because activity feels reassuring.
There has been a meeting.
The proposal has gone out.
The salesperson has spoken to the buyer again.
They have another meeting scheduled for next week.
The buyer likes the solution.
There is a next step in the CRM.
All of those things can make an opportunity look as though it is moving forward, and yet none of them necessarily tells you that the buyer has made a decision.
That distinction matters.
I’ve learned to ask a much simpler question when I am looking at an opportunity:
What’s changed since your last conversation?
Not how many emails were sent. Not whether another meeting was booked. Not whether the salesperson feels positive about the opportunity.
- What actually changed?
- Has the buyer made a decision and what was that decision?
- Has another stakeholder become involved and who was that stakeholder?
- Has the business case changed and what was that change?
- Has there been a commitment to a date and what is that date?
- Has responsibility for the next step moved to the buyer and who has it moved to?
- Has something happened inside the customer’s organisation that gives you evidence that this opportunity is becoming revenue rather than simply continuing to move through your sales process?
Because movement isn’t commitment.
And this is where I think sales leaders can get caught.
We see activity and interpret it as progress, when what we really need to be looking for is evidence of commitment.
Activity can create an illusion of progress. Commitment leaves evidence.
This is where forecasting gets uncomfortable
Most salespeople aren’t deliberately giving you a bad forecast, and I think that is important to say because otherwise the conversation very quickly becomes one about accountability, pressure and whether the salesperson is telling the truth.
Often the problem is much more subtle than that.
The salesperson believes the buyer is going to buy.
The sales leader believes the salesperson.
The forecast reflects that belief.
And because everyone has become comfortable with the belief, it starts to feel like a fact.
That is what I call Fantastical Forecasting – not because someone is fantasising or not being honest, but because assumptions can gradually become accepted as facts when nobody stops to challenge them.
The salesperson may have a perfectly reasonable reason for believing the deal will close. Perhaps the buyer said they were interested. Perhaps the executive sponsor was enthusiastic. Perhaps the proposal was well received.
But interest isn't a decision.
A good conversation isn’t a commitment.
And a buyer saying they like your solution isn’t the same thing as a buyer deciding to buy it.
Those distinctions matter enormously when you are responsible for a number.
Because once a belief enters the forecast, it can become surprisingly difficult for anyone to challenge it without feeling as though they are challenging the salesperson, the sales leader or the opportunity itself.
That is where leadership matters.
So, what should you look at?
If you don’t trust your sales forecast, I wouldn’t start by adding another forecasting meeting.
I would go back to the opportunities that recently drifted out and look at what happened before the date moved.
Take five of them and ask yourself:
- What did we believe would happen?
- What had the buyer actually decided?
- What evidence did we have?
- What were we assuming?
- What did we know but fail to act on?
And then ask the question I find particularly revealing:
When did we first have enough information to know the forecast was at risk?
Because the forecast usually doesn’t become wrong on the day the deal was moved from the initial due date.
That is simply the day you finally discover that it was wrong earlier.
That is the bit I want leaders to pay attention to.
If you can identify where the evidence existed but wasn’t acted upon, you are no longer having a conversation about a missed deal. You are beginning to see the decisions that created the missed revenue.
And that is a much more useful conversation to have with a leadership team.
The five decisions behind a trustworthy forecast
This is where the thinking in Sales ≠ Revenue comes together.
I don’t believe forecast accuracy is simply a sales operations issue, because the forecast is influenced by decisions being made throughout the commercial system.
Alignment matters because people need to understand what the business is actually committing to, what good looks like and what standards they are expected to operate within that are set by you, the leader.
Understanding matters because you cannot reliably forecast a buyer’s decision if you don’t understand how that buyer is making the decision, who else is involved and what has to happen inside their organisation before they can move.
Perspective matters because leaders need to be able to see what is actually happening rather than what they hope is happening. This is where assumptions, patterns and uncomfortable information need to be brought into view aligning the pipeline from both buyer and seller perspective.
Ownership matters because a number that belongs to everyone can very easily belong to no one. If nobody truly owns the outcome, there is always somewhere for responsibility to disappear when the number moves.
And Visibility matters because good commercial judgement cannot remain trapped inside one person’s head. The thinking, information and experience that help an organisation make better commercial decisions need to become visible so they can be used beyond the individual who happens to hold them.
These decisions don’t suddenly appear during a forecast meeting.
They have been playing out for weeks and months before the forecast reaches the executive team.
That is why revenue becomes unpredictable one decision at a time.
A trustworthy forecast is the result, not the starting point
When a CEO tells me they don’t trust their forecast, I don’t immediately hear, ‘We need a better spreadsheet or CRM.’
I hear something different.
I hear that somewhere underneath the number, there is a lack of confidence in the decisions that have created it.
And that requires a different conversation.
Sometimes the answer isn’t more activity, more pressure on the sales team or another forecasting methodology. Sometimes the answer is to slow down long enough to understand what is actually happening.
What has the buyer decided?
What evidence do we have?
What are we assuming?
What are we avoiding?
Who owns the number?
And, perhaps most importantly, what decision needs to be made now?
Because you don’t lose revenue at the end of the month or quarter.
You lose it weeks — sometimes months — earlier, when assumptions go unchallenged, activity gets mistaken for commitment and the forecast becomes more hopeful than truthful.
That is why I believe revenue follows the leader.
If you want a forecast you can trust, don’t start with the forecast. Start with the decisions that created it.
Sales ≠ Revenue: The Five Leadership Decisions That Do explores those decisions in depth and the leadership patterns that sit underneath predictable revenue.
Revenue doesn’t start in the pipeline. Revenue follows the leader™.
I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.
If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.
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And if you’d rather join the discussion, you can also join me on Substack. That’s where the Revenue Leader of Influence community is starting to have these conversations in real time.
