You're at the finish line, about to cross, and suddenly it's further away than you thought.
Every time you get closer, it moves. Like some twisted mirage.
That's revenue forecasting in most businesses.
Reps hate it. Managers take heat from their bosses for it, and a bad forecast from your team means a beating from the CRO later. I get it.
As a rep, I remember thinking 'dude, get off my back. It'll close when it closes.'
Hearing my own thoughts now, as a leader, I want to jump in a DeLorean, gun it to 88mph, and go back in time to give past-me a slap.
Because forecasting matters. Here's why.
Things happening when people say they will is, above all, a signal of control. When people consistently miss the dates they gave you, confidence collapses and executive planning becomes nearly impossible.
Think about the last time someone promised you something and let you down - probably an electrician or plumber. Very quickly you lose faith in the weight of that person's words.
Forecasting, as with anything else you commit to in life, is no different.
But here's what I learned taking Mambu from $4m to $50m: bad forecasting is a symptom. The disease is a lack of understanding of the buying process.
Everyone gets the fundamentals. Customer has a problem, we have a solution, a selection happens, somebody signs. But zoom in and the picture goes as fuzzy and pixelated as a 1970s arcade game.
Budgeting cycles. Decision committees, and how often they actually meet. Individual sign-off limits. Infosec reviews. A constant stream of 'unexpected' steps that were always going to happen. The salesperson just couldn't see them.
So they guess. Based on intuition, or worse, based on their buyer. And here's the kicker: your champion usually knows no more about their own company's buying process than you do. You are the expert, not them! That's the job of an enterprise salesperson.
Most of the time, the blind spots just cause a delay. You work the fundamentals, react to each surprise as it lands, and honestly, most of the time it works out.
Until it doesn't. Because every so often, one of those little complexity ambushes doesn't delay the deal. It kills it.
I looked at the numbers once and found the correlation I'd suspected. The people on my team with the worst forecast accuracy also had the worst close rates. About 25-30% worse.
The reps who couldn't tell me when were the same reps who couldn't make it happen at all.
And this, in my opinion, is one of the biggest failings of most sales training. We teach a Sales Process. We almost never teach How Businesses Buy.
Your customer is not in your sales process. You are in their buying process.
It's the first thing I cover in most of my training, and you can see people mouth "ohhh fuck" as they realise how obvious it is. Like someone turned their glasses the right way round and everything snaps into focus.
That change of perspective, changes everything.
So here's a test for your next pipeline review. Don't ask your reps when the deal will close. Ask them to walk you through how that customer buys. Committee, budget, sign-off limits, security review, the lot.
If you get a confident and detailed answer, trust the date. If you get a blank stare, you don't have a forecasting problem.
Now you know why the finish line keeps moving.
But if you don't train them on this properly, expect that forecast to keep slipping.