Stop Letting One Big Deal Hijack the Forecast
That massive contract in your pipeline is not a trend; it is a lottery ticket. We isolate 'Hero Deals' to keep your core forecast honest and safe.
The Lottery Ticket in a Suit
Look at this bar chart of Projected Revenue.
January: $50k. February: $52k. March: $250k.
The bar for March towers over the others. It looks like a skyscraper in a village of huts. This is the “Hero Deal.” The team is excited. They are planning to hire three new engineers in April based on this intake.
But this chart is distorting reality. It is treating a binary event (Win/Loss) as a linear trend.
The Distortion: When we average the probability of a massive deal—say, 50% of $400k—we put $200k into the forecast. But in reality, we will never get $200k. We will get either $400k (Win) or $0 (Loss). The “Expected Value” is a mathematical fiction that does not pay bills.
The Signal: We must separate the signal (the steady hum of our core business) from the noise (the giant, unpredictable event).
The “Lottery Layer”
We need to restructure the forecast. We are going to build a Stacked Bar Chart, but with a very specific rule.
- Bottom Layer (Blue): The “Base Rate.” This is your bread and butter. The small contracts. The recurring revenue. The stuff that keeps the lights on.
- Top Layer (Gold): The “Hero Deal.”
[TO EDITOR: Illustration needed. A Stacked Bar Chart. The Blue bars are steady and boring. The Gold bar sits on top of March, massive and precarious. A pair of scissors is cutting the Gold bar away. Caption: “Can you survive without the Gold?”]
The Stress Test
Now, I want you to mentally remove the Gold layer.
Look at the Blue layer for March. Is it growing? Or is it shrinking?
Often, when a sales team chases a Whale, they neglect the Barnacles. The Blue layer starts to dip. But because the Gold layer is so big, the “Total Forecast” still looks like it is going up. The Hero Deal is hiding the rot in the core business.
If that big deal slips to April—or June, or next year—and you have hired based on the total bar, you are in trouble.
Plan your expenses on the Blue. Treat the Gold as a bonus, a windfall, a lottery ticket. If it comes, we feast. If it does not, we do not starve.
FAQs
But the client said they are ready to sign!
Clients are polite. Legal departments are not. Until the ink is wet, the deal is a ghost.
Should I delete it from the forecast?
No. You isolate it. You create a specific layer for it so you can toggle it on and off.
Why are big deals dangerous?
Because they mask the performance of the core business. They hide the fact that your small deals are drying up.