1. The Situation
At the start of a quarter, the forecast looks solid. 10 weeks out, leadership has reasonable confidence. Then week 6 arrives and a $400K deal gets pushed. Then another. By week 10 you're doing recovery math and having tense conversations about what's actually in the commit.
This happens in most B2B organisations, most quarters. It gets normalised. The gap between what sales calls commit and what actually closes gets built into the financial model as an assumed discount.
The problem isn't that the gap exists. It's that nobody has defined what would close it.
2. The Usual Explanation
The standard response is better forecasting process. More frequent pipeline reviews. Managers challenging reps harder. A new forecasting tool with real-time visibility. Sometimes an AI layer that learns from historical data.
None of these fix the decay. They just make the decay more visible, faster.
Because the decay isn't caused by insufficient process or data. It's caused by the absence of a shared definition of what "evidence" means in a deal.
3. Why That Fails
When a rep marks a deal as "commit," what exactly are they asserting? In most organisations, this is genuinely unclear. Is it that the rep believes it will close? That the champion said they want to buy? That there's no obvious blocker?
All of these are different assertions with different probability distributions. But the CRM treats them identically.
So a manager reviews the commit column and reads a mix of evidence-based and hope-based claims with no way to distinguish them. They apply a gut discount. Finance applies a more aggressive one. The CFO applies another. By the time it reaches the board, the number has been discounted four times by four different heuristics, none grounded in deal-level evidence.
4. The Actual Constraint
The constraint is the absence of a shared evidence standard — a specific, agreed definition of what a rep must be able to point to before a deal enters commit. Not "I believe it will close." Specific evidence:
- Procurement has confirmed budget availability in writing
- Legal has received and reviewed the contract
- The economic buyer confirmed the decision on a call with the manager
- A mutual close plan exists with the buyer's name and agreed milestones
The specific criteria will vary by deal size. But they need to be defined, written down, and enforced — not left to each rep's optimism threshold.
5. Consequences
When there's no evidence standard, forecasts decay in a predictable pattern. Early-quarter confidence is high because there's nothing to contradict it. As the quarter progresses, reality asserts itself. The rep, under pressure to protect their commit, holds on too long. By the time the problem is acknowledged, there's no time to respond.
The downstream effects: financial planning becomes unreliable, hiring decisions get made on false revenue assumptions, the board loses confidence in management's ability to call the business.
6. What Must Change
Define the evidence standard. Get sales leadership and finance in a room and answer one question: what must a rep be able to point to before a deal goes into commit?
In deal reviews, the question changes from "are you confident?" to "what's the evidence?" If the rep can answer it specifically, the deal stays in commit. If not, it moves to best case until it can.
This will hurt the commit number in the short term. A smaller, accurate commit is worth more than a larger, fictional one.
7. How GTM-360 Thinks About This
Forecasting is a confidence problem, not a data problem. Most organisations have more than enough data. What they lack is a shared language for translating deal-level signals into a number the business can actually plan around.
No tool solves it until the underlying evidence standard is set. If your forecasts are consistently decaying by 20–30% through the quarter, the diagnostic will identify whether the issue is the evidence standard, the stage definitions, or something upstream in how deals are being qualified.