Why You Can't Predict Next Month's Sales

Ask your team what's closing this month. One rep says four deals. Another says "a couple, maybe." The pipeline report says double what you banked last month. By the 25th you know the real number, and it's never the one they gave you.

So you plan on gut feel. You hold off on the hire. You keep extra cash aside, just in case. You end up running the business looking backwards, because nobody can tell you what's coming.

Why the number is always wrong

Your reps aren't lying to you. The forecast is wrong because nobody agreed what each stage means. To one rep, "proposal sent" means the buyer asked for a price and has the budget. To another, it means he emailed a PDF and heard nothing back. Both deals sit in the same column with the same weight, and the total tells you nothing.

How to fix the forecast

Forecasting is a weekly habit, not a spreadsheet. A handful of rules do most of the work.

• Define every stage by what the buyer did. A deal moves to "proposal" when the buyer has agreed the problem, named who signs, and asked for the price. Sending something isn't progress. The buyer acting is.
• Every deal needs a booked next step with a date. No next step, no place in the forecast. It's a hope, not a deal. This one rule clears out a surprising amount of the pipeline in the first week.
• Split the number into commit and upside. Commit is what the rep would bet their own money on. Upside is everything else. You run the business on commit and you chase the upside.
• Hold a short forecast call every week. Same day, same time, every deal over a set size. The rep says what changed since last week and what happens next. If nothing has moved in two weeks, the deal drops a stage.

The first forecast call with a new team is usually uncomfortable. I've watched half a pipeline turn out to be deals nobody had spoken to in a month. That isn't bad news. It's the first honest number the owner has had all year.

What good looks like

After a couple of months, the commit number lands close to what you actually bank. Not perfect. Close enough that you can make the hire, place the stock order, or take a week off without guessing. And when a deal slips, you hear about it on the forecast call, not on the last day of the month.

Keep reading: the weekly deal review that catches deals before they slip, a sales scorecard your reps will actually use.