Sales forecasting fails not because sales reps are bad at predicting outcomes, but because leaders lack visibility into real sales behavior. Accurate forecasting requires understanding activity, engagement, and deal momentum — not just CRM stages or pipeline math. When leaders coach based on evidence instead of gut feel, forecasts become reliable and actionable.
What You Will Learn
- Why most sales forecasting problems are leadership and visibility issues, not CRM or spreadsheet problems
- How focusing only on pipeline math creates false confidence
- The difference between lagging indicators and leading indicators in sales forecasting
- Why better coaching leads to better forecasts
- How visibility into real sales activity helps leaders spot risk earlier
- What high-performing revenue teams do differently to forecast with confidence
Sales Forecasting: What do sales leaders want versus what they need
Every sales leader says they want an accurate forecast.
What they usually mean is:
“I want my number to stop misleading me.”
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most sales forecasting problems have nothing to do with sales forecasting models, spreadsheets, or even CRM hygiene. They’re symptoms of a deeper issue—a lack of visibility into how sales actually happens.
I’ve worked with founders, CROs, and VPs of Sales across SaaS, services, and enterprise organizations. The pattern is painfully consistent:
- Deals stall for “unknown reasons”
- Forecasts swing wildly week to week
- Reps sound confident… until they miss
- Managers rely on gut feel instead of evidence
And when pressure mounts, the response is usually the same:
“The beatings will continue until morale improves.” Meaning more pipeline reviews, more required fields, more internal reporting, more stress, more anxiety, and deals still pushing. Remember, CROs don’t want AI, CROs want answers without clicking through six dashboards to find them.
None of that fixes the real problem.
The real issue is activity without insight.
You Can’t Forecast Outcomes If You Can’t See Behavior
Sales leaders don’t lose control of forecasts overnight. They lose it slowly—one blind spot at a time. They want to balance not being a micro-manager and being a “friendly boss” with being held accountable to their leadership team and the revenue targets.
Stop Forcing Your Forecast
Most organizations attempt to force forecast outcomes—revenue, close dates, deal size—without clearly understanding the behaviors that drive those outcomes:
- Which meetings actually move deals forward?
- How often are executives truly engaged?
- Where do deals stall after “great” calls?
- Which reps consistently do the right work versus the most visible work?
Generally speaking, CRM data alone doesn’t answer these questions very well. It shows what reps say happened—not what actually happened. And in many cases it cannot aggregate the data of multiple opportunities to look for repetitive signals that can help provide insight and guidance.
Where modern revenue intelligence matters
Platforms like People.ai help sales leaders understand pipeline health by capturing real activity across email, meetings, and calendars—automatically, without adding friction for reps.
This same visibility underpins how I coach teams using NEAT Selling™ and Sales Forecasting Best Practices
When leaders can see what’s actually happening, coaching becomes specific, timely, and effective.
Forecast Accuracy Is a Coaching Problem, Not a Reporting Problem
When forecasts miss, leaders often respond with tighter inspection:
- More deal reviews hidden under the title of “One-on-Ones”
- More CRM fields
- More “commit” conversations
- Hounding and stalking reps repeatedly as deadlines approach
But inspection without insight just creates better stories—not better results. And let’s be honest: most of that inspection time is really just navigating software, not actually coaching.
Accurate sales forecasting improves when coaching improves
Coaching improves when leaders can clearly see:
- The blind spots in sales forecasting
- Who is engaging the buying committee
- Where momentum is real versus artificial
- Which deals are active versus quietly decaying
- How seller behavior correlates with wins and losses
Instead of asking:
“How confident are you in this deal?”
Leaders can ask:
“We haven’t had senior-level engagement in three weeks—what’s the plan to regain momentum?”
That’s how forecasts stabilize.
Pipeline Coverage Without Activity Context Is False Confidence
One of the most common sales forecasting traps is pipeline math without behavioral context. We’ve all heard the 3x pipeline coverage as a standard. And most of the time it’s a joke. Yet nobody wants to actually do the math and reverse engineer pipeline coverage based on average sales cycle length, deal size, industry influences and cyclical issues.
Because of this, leaders feel safe with false belief systems like:
- Pipeline coverage looks healthy
- Deal counts are high
- Stages are populated
- My reps are telling me it will close
- Leaders don’t ask the right questions because they don’t want to feel micro-managey.
The reality is the opposite because:
- Deals aren’t moving.
- Volume doesn’t equal velocity.
- Sales leaders do not understand:
- Which activities correlate with progression
- Where deals consistently stall
- How long meaningful engagement actually lasts
Revenue intelligence surfaces these patterns by showing how top performers behave differently than average performers—at scale. And it can show how the best deals are moving through various stages regardless of the sales rep running the deal.
Sales Forecasting Fails When Leaders Rely on Lagging Indicators
Most sales teams forecast using lagging indicators:
- Stage changes
- Length of deal in cycle
- Close date updates
- Deal size edits
- Inadequate and relevant data capture
By the time those change, the deal is already won—or already lost.
High-performing teams focus on leading indicators, such as:
- Confirmation and execution of next steps
- Defining the skeptics early, not the decision makers
- Meeting frequency and quality
- Stakeholder expansion
- Buyer response velocity
- Consistency of engagement
This allows leaders to intervene earlier and forecast with confidence.
Better Sales Forecasting Start With Better Questions
Conversational intelligence is dead. Dashboards and reports are table stakes. The real advantage is asking better questions—and getting answers without the scavenger hunt.
When leaders gain visibility into real activity, the quality of questions improves:
- Where are deals losing momentum?
- Which reps need help multithreading?
- Which deals look big but behave small?
That shift—from “smoking hope-i-um” based sales forecasting to evidence-based sales forecasting—is what separates reactive leaders from proactive ones.
Final Thought: Sales Forecasting Is a Leadership Signal
Your forecast doesn’t just predict revenue. It signals:
- How well your system captures all conversations
- How well your team understands buyers
- How effectively managers coach
- How visible execution truly is
When forecasts are unreliable, it’s rarely because reps are dishonest. It’s because leaders lack the visibility needed to guide behavior early enough.
Sales forecasting doesn’t get fixed with better spreadsheets. It gets fixed with better insight, better coaching, and better questions.
The teams I see winning in 2026 aren’t logging into more systems. They’re breaking down the walls between themselves and the answers they need. Check out my friends at People.ai —they’re building the kind of revenue intelligence that meets you where you work, not where your software wants you to live. People.ai can help you stop managing tools and start managing deals.
