The terms the forecast runs on.
Seven plain-language definitions of the ideas that recur across the Library. Each term has its own page, written answer-first, with a worked example and the questions people actually ask about it. Start here when a word in an essay needs pinning down.
Short answers. Full pages behind them.
The one-line version of each term is below. The full page carries the definition, the thresholds, how to measure it, and the common mistakes.
The total value of open pipeline for a period divided by the number you need to close. It measures the size of the haystack, not whether the needles are in it. Three times coverage is a comfort metric, not a safety one; what predicts a landed quarter is composition.
Read the definition →The share of a quarter's number carried by the top one to three deals. Above forty percent the quarter is fragile regardless of coverage. Below twenty percent you have architecture. When one deal carries more than forty percent, it fails to close about four times in five.
Read the definition →Testing whether a single opportunity is backed by named, dated evidence, not a stage or a percentage. Six lines, one deal, ten minutes. Forecast risk is a count of what nobody has verified. Different from a pipeline review, which is a different operation on the same list.
Read the definition →Whether a committed number still holds when its largest single dependency is removed. The biggest deal, the top rep, or the strongest play. Three removal tests, a four-step check, and a reporting format. Not survival analysis, which shares the word and nothing else.
Read the definition →Accuracy grades the past. Survivability tests the present. Accuracy measures how close the forecast landed once the quarter is closed. Survivability asks, inside the quarter, whether the call still holds if one load-bearing element moves. A perfectly accurate quarter can still have been one lost deal from a miss.
Read the comparison →The three moves that turn a sales result you cannot explain into a behavior you can run again. Isolate names the behavior, Refine improves it one change at a time, Compound stacks the named behaviors across reps and quarters. It is how a spike, a result nobody can name the cause of, becomes a system.
Read the definition →Writing your explanation of a deal three times, with “and then what?” between each, until the third names something you did. The first pass is the lazy vocabulary: timing, cold feet, procurement. The second puts you inside the deal. The third is usually where the work begins. Run on a stalled deal, it replaces a word you can only wait out with a reason you can act on.
Read the definition →Systems, not spikes.
One issue a week on pipeline, forecasting, and deal execution, taken down to the move a rep can run on Monday. Every issue lands in the Library the Friday it goes out.