Bad sales forecasts have a peculiar quality. They feel fine until they don’t. The number gets built, presented, and nodded at. Then the quarter ends twelve percent below it, and everyone spends a useful hour in a room explaining why this particular quarter was unusual. And then the next quarter is also unusual. In a similar direction.
The problem isn’t the explanation. The explanation is usually accurate. The problem is that the process producing the forecast doesn’t change, so the forecast keeps being wrong in the same ways. Here are five signs yours is doing that.
1. Three People Give Three Different Numbers
Ask your sales manager, a rep, and your revenue ops lead what the quarter looks like. If the answers are meaningfully different, you don’t have a forecast. You have three opinions on wearing a forecast’s clothing. Opinions are great in many settings. Headcount planning and investor conversations are not those settings. A forecast that changes based on who you ask isn’t measuring the pipeline. It’s measuring confidence levels.
2. The Last Two Weeks Do the Rescuing
Some late-quarter surge is normal. When the last ten days are the only reason the number gets reached, that’s worth examining. It usually means deals were reported as further along than the underlying signals supported, and deadline pressure substituted for genuine close-readiness. A sprint finish every single quarter isn’t hustle. It’s a sign the pipeline health picture wasn’t accurate to begin with.
3. Hiring Decisions Keep Arriving Late
Sales hiring takes three to six months to produce results. If the decision to hire gets triggered by demand that has already materialised rather than demand that’s been projected to arrive, the team will always be one cycle behind. Platforms like Revic.ai give revenue teams forecast data grounded in real-time signals rather than manually adjusted estimates.
That’s the difference between planning and reacting continuously. Most teams are doing the latter and calling it strategy.
4. Marketing and Sales Are Preparing for Different Realities
Marketing allocates spend based on what it expects the pipeline to need. Sales chases what it expects to close. When those expectations are built from different data and different assumptions, the output is misalignment that shows up as lead quality arguments, attribution debates, and campaigns that don’t support what sales is actually working on. A shared, reliable forecast fixes this structurally rather than requiring ongoing mediation meetings.
5. Every Post-Mortem Produces Explanations, Never Solutions
If your quarterly review cycle consistently produces good analysis of why the forecast was wrong and no change to how it gets built, the next quarter will produce the same review. Revic.ai and similar platforms exist to move the intervention earlier. Catching the signals that indicate risk while the quarter is still in motion is categorically more useful than accounting for the shortfall after the fact. The post-mortem is fine. It just shouldn’t be the primary mechanism.
Conclusion
Revenue forecasting isn’t a reporting function. It shapes every significant decision the business makes about people, budget and which opportunities to pursue. Getting it consistently wrong has a cost. It’s just one that tends to be absorbed quietly, misattributed to market conditions, and scheduled for another excellent post-mortem next quarter.
