The same thing happens every month. A number comes out, somebody asks whether it is realistic, and the conversation turns into going through deals one by one.
That conversation does not answer the question. Forecasts are not usually wrong because the judgement was optimistic. They are wrong because they were calculated over records nobody has touched in weeks.
Before arguing about the number, you can measure whether the data producing it is alive. Three counts, and none of them needs you to buy anything.
One: how many open deals have a close date in the past
The cheapest one, and the one that stings.
A deal with a close date of 15 August that is still open in September is not a deal that slipped. It is a deal nobody has looked after, because whoever owns it has not even gone in to move the date.
How to check it in HubSpot. Deals → Advanced filters → Close date is less than today, and Deal stage is none of the closed ones.
What the result means. Divide that by your total open deals. Above 20% and a fifth of this quarter's forecast rests on dates nobody defends any more. Not that all of them will fall through: that nobody knows which ones will.
Two: how many have changed stage in the last 30 days
The first count looks at a date. This one looks at movement.
A healthy pipeline moves. Deals come in, advance, close or are lost. A pipeline where 70% has sat in the same box for over a month is not a pipeline, it is a wish list with amounts attached.
How to check it in HubSpot. HubSpot itself stores when each deal entered its current stage. In the deals report the field is Date entered <stage name>, one per stage. The Deal stage funnel report for the period works too.
What it means. Compare it against your real sales cycle. If you sell in six weeks and half the pipeline has been still for eight, that half is not in negotiation. It is in limbo and nobody has said so.
Three: how many emails are on the record, and how many are in your inbox
You can do the two counts above with the CRM alone. This one has to leave it, and it is the one that decides.
Take three clients you have spoken to this week. Open their record and count the logged emails. Open your inbox and count the ones with that person.
What the difference means. Everything in your inbox and not on the record is activity that happened and that your numbers did not see. And it fails in both directions:
- It warns you about a stalled deal that is actually alive, because the rep has been writing from their phone every day and none of it gets logged.
- And it fails to warn you about a dead one, because somebody left a note two days ago even though the client has not answered in six weeks.
The second is the one that wrecks a forecast, because it reaches Friday looking healthy.
If you think this does not apply to you because your CRM captures email, it is worth checking: we measured it on a freshly created HubSpot portal and out of the box not one was logged.
What these three counts do not tell you
None of them tells you whether you will close the quarter. That is not what they measure.
What they measure is whether the floor the forecast stands on exists. A forecast calculated over fresh data can still fail for a thousand legitimate reasons: the market, a competitor, a client whose priorities changed. A forecast calculated over two-month-old records fails for a reason that is within your control.
Fix the floor first. Argue about the number after.
And why pushing the team does not fix it
The normal reaction to these three counts is to ask for the CRM to be updated. It gets updated for three weeks and goes back to how it was.
It is not laziness: logging gives nothing back to the person doing the logging. Fifteen minutes a day to produce something that rep already knows, and that mostly exists so somebody else can build a report.
The first two counts can be automated inside the CRM itself and it is worth doing. The third cannot, because a CRM can only count what has been written into it.
If you want your company's three numbers rather than doing them by hand, that is CERUNA's Revenue Blind Spot Audit: €750, report in 72 hours, refunded if it does not find three things you did not know.
One warning about the result
It might come out fine. If your three numbers are healthy you do not have this problem, and knowing that is worth something too: it means that when the forecast does miss, it missed for a business reason and not a hygiene one.
What is not worth anything is assuming it. The three counts take an afternoon.
And if any of the words in this article sound like jargon, they are all defined with an example in the glossary.