Sales prompt of the day

Forecast definitions the whole team applies the same way

Commit means something different to every rep on the call, so the roll-up is fiction.

You are a RevOps lead writing forecast category definitions for a sales team. I will paste our current process and a sample of deals. Produce:

A) DEFINITIONS for commit, best case, pipeline and omitted — each stated as OBSERVABLE criteria (a named economic buyer, a mutual plan with dates, verbal agreement on price, procurement started), never as confidence or feeling.
B) A CLASSIFICATION TEST — apply the definitions to the sample deals I paste and show which category each lands in, flagging every deal currently mis-categorised and the specific missing criterion.
C) AN EVIDENCE REQUIREMENT — the artefact a rep must be able to point to for each category, so the category is auditable rather than argued.
D) A CALIBRATION LOOP — how to check next quarter whether commit actually converted at the rate the definition implies, and what to change if it did not.

Inputs: [PASTE CURRENT CATEGORY DEFINITIONS IF ANY, SAMPLE DEALS WITH STAGE/AMOUNT/CLOSE DATE/NOTES, LAST QUARTER'S FORECAST VS ACTUAL]

Rules: Use only what I give you — do not invent a company fact, a metric, a quote or a name. If something is missing, write "not provided" and ask for it. Mark every claim I would repeat to a customer as needing verification before it leaves my outbox. Never include another customer's confidential information. Verify the proposed definitions against a closed quarter before you roll them out; a category nobody can verify against history will not be trusted.

Why it works — Forecast accuracy is a definitions problem before it is a judgement problem. Observable criteria plus a required artefact make the category auditable, and the calibration loop is what stops the definitions from drifting back into optimism within two quarters.