The Fork in the Road for B2B Sales

A friend recently used the term “forecast fiction” to describe his pipeline. It was bloated with unrealistic deals and produced forecasts no one believed.

“Everyone knows this. Yet the practice persists.”

It made me wonder: does truth matter?

A few years ago, I wrote about truth in business. I was enamored of a 2003 story about Google that underscores the forecast fiction issue.

Google execs Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin pitched measurable advertising to Viacom president Mel Karmazin: spend X, get Y—transparent, accountable. Businesses could optimize advertising spend.

Karmazin asked why he’d want anyone to know what worked. He was selling billions in advertising—without transparency. He exploited opaqueness. Truth, he felt, threatened the magic.

Viacom, in 2003 was valued at roughly $80B. It now sits inside Paramount/Skydance, whose combined valuation is $11B today. Google IPO’d in 2004 at $23B and is worth $3.7 trillion today.

Embrace transparency or resist it.

B2B sellers today face a similar choice.

Like unmeasured advertising, time-honored forecast rollups preserve opacity. They allow interpretation, explanation. They allow the story to shift as needed. 

SalesTech to the rescue?

Dozens of SalesTech vendors promise to fix forecast fiction with hyper-accurate forecasts. They streamline rollups, replace spreadsheets with web apps, overlay management opinions, and deliver dashboards.

Do they succeed? Surprisingly, the evidence says no.

“Commits” are usually too low and offer only short-term visibility. “Best Case” is often too high. Sometimes they bracket the outcome, but so widely that the range is useless. 

What looks like rigor becomes streamlined and institutionalized narrative management.

Hierarchical management overrides produce multiple views of what might happen. AI forecasts add to the confusion. Dashboards proliferate. Walls of numbers confuse more than elucidate. 

The rollup ritual burden—and forecast fiction—persist.

A typical "wall of numbers" dashboard. We've seen examples with five different forecasts for the same business on one dashboard. Maybe "pentangulation" is helpful. One of these figures is bound to be right. At some time.

Maximize accuracy vs. maximize sales

B2B selling is volatile. Forecast rollups don’t eliminate volatility—they collapse a probability distribution into a handful of opinion-based categories, obscuring risk.

Sales leaders aren’t statisticians. But vendors who brand themselves as analytics experts should know that hyper-accuracy in a volatile system is fantasy. Instead of revamping, they streamline the standard ritual and layer AI on top—suggesting precision is attainable.

It’s not.

And worse, optimizing for accuracy constrains upside. Teams make safer calls and slow down once the forecast is covered.

You can maximize forecast accuracy. Or you can maximize sales. You can’t do both.

So why does this flawed process persist?

Because AI forecasts and rollups preserve narrative flexibility without the appearance of sandbagging. Misses can be explained. Wins can be heroic. With enough numbers on a dashboard, one is bound to be right.

And most companies don’t see a better alternative.

The alternative

Rollups require sellers to maintain forecast categories on every deal—time that could be spent selling.

A better approach would eliminate that ritual altogether. Instead of trying to hide volatility with walls of numbers and claims of accuracy, it would focus on how to shift the outcome. 

It would model uncertainty explicitly with probability distributions, quantify risk, and identify the levers that actually change outcomes most effectively.

Not just predict the future—but show how to improve it.

That’s the standard we hold ourselves to.

In 2003, Karmazin feared that transparency would destroy the magic.

It turned out that magic—not transparency—was the risk.

It’s time to choose. Which story do you want to be in?