What Is Your Sales Forecast for Next Quarter?

A sales forecast for the coming quarter is a probability-weighted estimate of the deal value you will actually close over the next three months, built on the pipeline you have today — not on ambition. It differs from a target in one key way: a target is a management decision, while a forecast is a reading of what the current data says.

Why It Matters

Owners rarely push back on a low number. What they push back on is a volatile one. When your forecast drops from three million to a million and a half halfway through the quarter, the problem isn't the market — it's how the number was built. And plenty of decisions hang on that figure: hiring, inventory purchases, committing to a bank guarantee for a tender, cash flow scheduling.

A forecast that gets believed is one that carries its own evidence: how many deals, at what value, at which stage, and why you weighted them the way you did.

How to Calculate and Apply It

Use three layers — and the best thing you can do is present all three together rather than collapsing them into one figure:

• Committed: Deals that are signed or have a purchase order issued but aren't yet booked as revenue. Near-certain probability.
• Weighted: Each opportunity's value multiplied by the historical close rate for its stage — not by the rep's personal gut feel. If deals that reach "proposal submitted" have historically closed at 40%, that's the number you use.
• Possible: Opportunities that haven't moved past qualification. Report these as a count, not a value, so they don't inflate the total.

Require three fields for every opportunity included in the forecast: a specific expected close date, a value, and a stage updated within the last two weeks. Anything missing one of the three comes out of the calculation entirely — it doesn't get down-weighted, it gets removed.

A Worked Example

Take a hypothetical IT solutions company: SAR 1 million committed; a weighted layer of twelve opportunities totalling SAR 3 million, which stage-based close rates reduce to SAR 900,000; and twenty possible opportunities with no stated value.

Reported forecast: SAR 1.9 million — delivered with one sentence for the owner: "Three deals account for 60% of the weighted number, and if any one of them slips, the forecast drops by SAR 300,000." That sentence, not the number itself, is what builds trust.