In most businesses, the sales team will talk about a funnel of opportunities that will mature into closed deals. They may have a waterfall spreadsheet showing the sequence of sales stages and conversion events, and they're almost sure to calculate "pipeline coverage": an indication of how much they have in potential deals to cover their target number for the quarter. Despite the apparent precision of their numbers, sales forecasts all too often don't match reality.
What if the forecasting problem isn't the data, but the model and assumptions they're using? And what does this imply for measurements, reports, and dashboards in your CRM system?
