Prepared for Northfield Software · CRO and RevOps · Q4 2025 to Q3 2026

Your managers' calls are 15% less accurate than your own history.

Northfield is invented and so is every number here. The method is real, and it is the one we would run on your export. One file, five business days, two pages back.

VerdictNo

Team-wide, manager judgment does not beat the base rate. Two of six teams do.

Trapped every quarter

Selling hours, about reps you already pay for.

Worth recovering

Gross profit a quarter at 45% recovery, at your own win rate and margin.

About 3½ minutes · or scroll and read

01 What you send

One export. About an hour of an analyst's time.

Four quarters of weekly forecast snapshots: every open deal, its stage, its amount, the manager's call, and how it ended. IDs hashed. No customer names.

Snapshot rows

Opportunities

45 · 6Reps · teams

02 Verdict

Does your managers' judgment beat the base rate?

The base rate is your own history: how often deals at each stage actually closed. A manager's call earns its place only if it is more accurate than that.

Team-wide No · 15% worse

Two teams beat it. Strategic Accounts is too small to call yet. Three teams do worse than their own history.

Beats the base rateToo close to callWorse than the base rate

Accuracy is the Brier score of the call against the outcome, compared with the stage base rate from the other three quarters. Whiskers show the 90% range from resampling deals.

03 What the forecast costs

hours a quarter to produce the number.

The Monday call, the one-to-one deal reviews, the rep prep. of those hours sit in teams whose call does not beat the base rate. Those hours produce a number your history already gives you.

Call, review and prep times are what Northfield stated in the intake call. Hours are per quarter of 13 weeks.

04 Carry

8 in 10 lost deals were kept open long after they stopped moving.

A deal Northfield eventually wins rarely sits at one stage for more than 3 weeks. Lost deals sat far longer, and each week open costs selling time. That adds up to hours a quarter.

Weeks a lost deal stayed open after its last stage change, beyond the 3 weeks a winning deal usually sits (the 75th percentile, measured from your won deals). Selling time per open deal: 1.5 hours a week, modelled.

05 Yield

The same pipeline can hide a few real deals or many thin ones.

Every Northfield rep, by how many deals they carry and what each one is worth. Upper left: a few deals worth working. Lower right: a crowded list of thin ones. It is the Rep A and Rep B from our homepage, found in the export.

Week 4 of Q3 2026. Yield is weighted pipeline per open deal, weighted by the stage base rate. Circle size is the rep's total weighted pipeline.

06 The Monday Four

Four columns for the call you already run.

No new system and no timesheet. Your analyst can produce these every Monday from the same export.

07 What it is worth

Trapped hours, priced at your own win rate and margin.

Some hours never come back. Move the recovery rate and the chain recalculates. Even the cautious end clears the bar for going deeper.

Trappedhours a quarter: carried deals plus reviews that do not beat the base rate

Recovered

Bookingsat per selling hour, the next hour earning half the average

Gross profita quarter at 78% gross margin, with no new headcount or tooling

Recovery rate45% of trapped hours put back into selling

20%45% (our default)70%

A year at this rate

Against the Diagnostic fee

08 The answer

Go deeper: yes. Three changes can start Monday.

Run three teams from the base rate

Enterprise West, Public Sector and Mid-Market North: start the call from the stage base rate and inspect only the deals the manager wants to move off it, with a reason.

Close out stalled deals at three weeks

Any deal still at its stage after 3 weeks is closed or re-qualified, and the hours it returns are counted as Release, so no rep's number suffers for cleaning the list.

Leave the two good teams alone

Enterprise East and Mid-Market South beat the base rate. Their reviews earn their hours. Strategic Accounts gets another two quarters of data before anyone decides.

What this Read cannot see: why three teams miss. Management quality, compensation and internal friction sit on the organization side of the Ledger. That is measured in the Value Room Diagnostic.

09 The method

Everything written out, so your analyst can rerun it.

Every formula and every assumption, marked as measured from your file, stated by you, or modelled by us.

Verdict: manager call against the base rate

For every open deal at every weekly snapshot, score the manager's call and the stage base rate against the eventual outcome (won = 1, lost = 0). The base rate for a quarter comes from the other three quarters, so no quarter is graded against itself.

Brier      = mean( (probability − outcome)² )
Skill      = 1 − Brier(manager) ÷ Brier(base rate)
Verdict    = Yes if the 90% range of Skill sits above 0,
             No if it sits below 0, otherwise "too close to call"

The 90% range comes from resampling whole deals 2,000 times. Forecast categories map to probabilities as recorded in the CRM.

Forecast process hours

Call hours     = minutes ÷ 60 × attendees × 13 weeks
Review hours   = reps × 2 × review minutes ÷ 60 × 13   (manager and rep)
Prep hours     = reps × prep minutes ÷ 60 × 13
No-return      = review + prep hours in teams whose Verdict is not Yes

Carry and Release

A deal's stall point is its last stage change. Grace is the 75th percentile of time a won deal spends at one stage. Weeks a lost deal stayed open beyond grace are carried weeks.

Carry (team)    = median carried weeks of lost deals
Release (hours) = carried weeks × 1.5 selling hours per open deal per week ÷ 4 quarters

Yield

Yield (rep) = Σ (amount × stage base rate) ÷ open deals, at a fixed snapshot

Value at your own win rate

Per selling hour = bookings per quarter ÷ (reps × 520 h × selling-time share)
Recovered hours  = trapped hours × recovery rate
Bookings         = recovered hours × per selling hour × 0.5 (marginal hour)
Gross profit     = bookings × gross margin

We count first-year bookings only. Renewal and expansion would raise the figure, so this is the cautious version.

Assumptions, and where each one comes from

Download the two-page Read · PDF Download the Northfield export · CSV