The method
A forecast is more than a prediction. It is how you decide where the hours go.
Deciding under uncertainty has been settled corporate finance for thirty years. It has been applied to factories, to drug pipelines, to customer portfolios, to entire marketing budgets. It is rarely applied to the instrument your sales organization runs every Monday morning.
That is the gap. The theory is old. It has rarely been brought into this room.
What a forecast is actually for
A forecast earns its keep only through the decisions it changes. If the number does not change what anyone does that week, the ninety minutes spent producing it are cost, and the capacity consumed producing it is the same capacity you are being asked to grow.
Most forecast processes are built on weighted pipeline: value times probability, summed. That is an expected value. It is also the one number in the quarter guaranteed not to happen, because nothing ever lands on an average.
Worse, it charges nothing for the thing it consumes. Headcount is budgeted. Tooling is budgeted. Selling capacity, the thing both are bought to produce, appears on no report at any cost at all.
Two reps, one number
Back to Rep B. His best move is to kill his four weakest deals and put that time somewhere real.
On Monday's forecast call, his number drops by $80,000.
So he doesn't. Nobody does. The deals get carried until they die on their own, consuming the capacity you are already paying for.
Your pipeline is not inflated because your people are optimistic. It is inflated because carrying a dead deal costs nothing and removing one costs you on the call.
Rep A $204,000 ÷ 3 open deals = $68,000 Rep B $204,000 ÷ 10 open deals = $20,400
Ten deals at 24% is roughly twice as wide a spread of outcomes as three at 80%. The same expected value, and a quarter that can land almost anywhere.
Both numbers are in your CRM today. Neither requires a timesheet.
The Monday Four
The Monday Four are four measures added to the forecast call you already run. They are the part of the Process layer you install and run every week. They do not replace your CRM, your forecast tool or your process. They sit on top of all three, computed from data those systems already hold.
- Yield
Weighted pipeline per open opportunity, by rep and by segment.
Separates the rep who is carrying three real deals from the one carrying ten thin ones.
- Carry
How long a deal sits after it stops moving, before anyone removes it.
Turns dead pipeline from an anecdote into a rate you can manage.
- Release
Capacity returned to selling when a deal is closed out early, scored as a gain.
Removes the reason nobody ever kills anything.
- Verdict
Whether your managers' forecast judgment beats the base rate, yes or no, and by how much.
Tells you where inspection is worth the hours and where it is costing you them.
Four columns. No new system, no timesheet, no change to how your reps work.
What this is and is not
The behavioral findings underneath this method are measured: 228 B2B sellers and front-line managers, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.
The capacity and valuation layer built on top of them is modelled. We label the difference on every document we produce, because the distinction is the difference between research and marketing.
We are not claiming a new theory. Real options and economic profit are established, cited, and older than most of the software in your stack. We are claiming they belong in your forecast, and we have built the method to put them there.
How the work maps
The bowtie and the seam.
Acquisition narrows to the close. Retention and growth widen from it. The seam is where selling capacity becomes expansion value.
A closed deal is the purchase of an expansion option that most forecasts price at zero.
Bowtie model: Jacco van der Kooij, Winning by Design. The pricing overlay is ours.