A forecast does not have to be right.
It has to be wrong in a direction you know.
A free playbook for founders. A forecast you can steer the company by, not a number you defend on Friday.
// 33 PAGES · FIVE PARTS · THREE CHECKLISTS · FREE
Seven things to know about forecasting.
Each is a mechanism you can plan around, and the guide is plain about the limit.
It is a decision instrument, not a report
The question a forecast answers is not "how is sales going." It is "what can we afford to commit to." Every hire, every marketing budget and every fundraising timeline rests on an assumption about revenue that has not arrived yet, and the forecast is where that assumption lives.
Probability belongs to the stage, not to the mood
Ask a salesperson how likely a deal is and you get a reading of their last conversation. Ask the pipeline — of all the deals that ever reached this stage, how many closed — and you get something far more stable.
Weighted and committed answer different questions
The weighted pipeline — every open deal multiplied by its stage probability — tells you what the pipeline is worth on average, over time.
Time is the variable most forecasts leave out
A deal can be real, qualified and genuinely going to close, and still wreck the forecast by closing next quarter instead of this one.
Lost deals are the cheapest data you own
Every lost deal comes with a reason, and the reason is information you paid for in time and attention. Collected consistently, lost reasons tell you whether you are losing on price, timing, fit, a competitor or plain indecision — and each of those has a different fix in a different part of the company.
It is the bridge between sales and cash
The Runway Playbook argues for forecasting revenue in three honest buckets — contracted, probable and hoped — and building the runway only on the first two.
And now the honest limit
Forecasting is statistics, and statistics need numbers. With a dozen open deals, a weighted pipeline is a polite fiction: no deal closes for sixty percent of its value.
Five parts, and a last page.
Parts one to five are the thinking and the doing, worth your time even if you never touch a piece of software. The last pages show how to run it in one place.
The Honest Case for a Forecast You Can Trust
Decide What the Numbers Mean
Run the Weekly Review Simply
Make It Steer the Company
The checklists and the mistakes
Do it all in one place
Nine mistakes, all of them avoidable.
None is about talent. They are failures of method, which is good news, because method is something you can set up in advance.
Borrowing stage probabilities from a template
Default percentages describe nobody's pipeline. They feel authoritative and drift further from reality every quarter they go unchecked.
Letting the seller set the probability
The person closest to the deal is the most optimistic about it. Stage history is duller and much more accurate.
Using the weighted pipeline to predict a single month
Averages need volume. A month contains a handful of deals, and the weighted figure for it is fiction with a currency symbol.
Presenting best case as commit
The gap between them is information. Collapsing it guarantees a miss and destroys trust in every later number.
Ignoring close dates and deal age
Most forecasts miss on timing, not on loss. A deal that will close next quarter is, for this quarter's cash, a lost deal.
Never marking deals lost
A pipeline that only grows is not healthy; it is unweeded. Old hopeful deals inflate every number built on top of them.
Recording lost reasons as "bad timing."
Vague reasons teach nothing. Capture the category and the buyer's own words, on the day.
Never comparing the forecast with what happened
Without a track record you cannot know how much to trust the number, so you either trust it too much or not at all.
Feeding signed deals into the cash plan as cash
Signature is not payment. The months between them are exactly where runway models quietly break.
Thirty-three pages.
Yours in one click.
Five parts, three checklists and the nine mistakes. One email with the link, no drip sequence, and we do not sell the list.