What is a Sales Forecast?
Also known as: Revenue forecast, pipeline forecast
A Sales Forecast predicts how much revenue will close in a future period, built from open pipeline, win probabilities, and deal timing. It is the number leadership plans hiring, spend, and board expectations around.
What is a Sales Forecast?
At its simplest, a forecast sums the expected value of deals likely to close in the period — often the weighted pipeline for that window, refined by rep judgment ("commit," "best case," "pipeline").
How it is built
Common methods: weighted pipeline (amount × stage probability), stage-based historical conversion, and rep-committed forecasting. Most teams blend a bottoms-up weighted view with rep commits and sanity-check against historical close rates.
Forecast vs Pipeline vs Weighted Pipeline
Open pipeline is everything in play; weighted pipeline discounts by probability; the forecast is the subset expected to close in a specific period. A forecast has a time horizon — pipeline does not.
Why it matters
Forecast accuracy is a board-level trust metric. Consistently missing forecast erodes credibility faster than missing plan. Tracking forecast vs actual every period is how you calibrate the model.