Why humans can't forecast sales

Published: Wed, 01/14/26

Updated: Mon, 01/19/26

January 14, 2026

TOGETHER WITH

Good morning Quota readers, and welcome back! As we settle into the new year and the Seasonal Affective Disorder kicks in, there’s nothing better you can do for your sales health than read a low-pressure newsletter designed to take you from an 8 to a 6. In this week’s issue, we’ll look at why forecasting almost always fails, and more. Enjoy!

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

Over 60% of salespeople say cold calling is their worst fear

Source: Digitaldefynd

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week:

A father and son kidnapped two car salesmen with an assault rifle and handgun after a deal for a Mercedes-Benz vehicle went awry, police say. Oscar Garcia-Berrios, 50, and his son Brandon Garcia, 23, purchased a used 2021 Mercedes-Benz vehicle from Car Express Florida for $37,000 on November 26, according to a probable cause affidavit. The pair were reportedly supposed to return to the dealership on November 28 to finalize the sale, but Garcia received a text at 4 p.m. from someone who worked at the dealership regarding a temporary tag that led the father and son to believe the dealership was attempting to rip them off. You can read about what happened here.
A man convicted of killing a traveling salesman during a robbery is set to become Florida's first execution of 2026. According to court records, Ronald Heath and his brother, Kenneth Heath, met traveling salesman Michael Sheridan at a Gainesville bar in May 1989. After hanging out at the bar, the three men agreed to go somewhere else to smoke marijuana. At some point, the brothers plotted to rob the other man, investigators said. Ronald Heath drove the group to a remote area, where Kenneth Heath pulled a handgun on Sheridan. The man initially refused to give the brothers anything, and Kenneth Heath shot Sheridan in the chest. You can read more about it here.

FEATURE

Photo by Eberhard Grossgasteiger

Why Humans Can’t Forecast Sales

Every salesperson has had this moment. It’s late in the quarter. The CRM (or spreadsheet) is open. The number on top of the page looks wrong, but everyone in the room agrees to nod at it anyway. Someone says, “We feel good about the pipeline.” Someone else says, “Let’s assume a little slippage.” The forecast gets locked.

Two weeks later, it misses.

Sales forecasting is treated like a math problem. In reality, it’s a psychology experiment that keeps failing for the same reason: it asks humans to predict uncertain futures under pressure, and humans are terrible at that.

The Comfort of a Number

Forecasts exist because organizations need them. Finance needs a number. Boards demand confidence. Investors want certainty. Planning without a forecast feels responsible and productive, even if it’s fiction.

Behavioral economists have a name for this impulse: the illusion of predictability. People prefer a wrong answer to no answer at all. A forecast provides emotional relief, not accuracy.

Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and author who spent decades studying human judgment, showed that people consistently overestimate their ability to predict outcomes in complex systems. Sales is one of the most complex systems in business. It depends on timing, budgets, internal politics, competing priorities, and human behavior that can change overnight.

Yet every quarter, we pretend it’s linear.

The Biases Baked Into Every Forecast

Sales forecasts don’t fail randomly. They fail in predictable ways. The most obvious is optimism bias. Reps believe deals will close because believing they won’t is psychologically unpleasant. Managers believe reps because challenging optimism creates friction. Numbers drift upward, because pessimism carries social cost.

Then there’s anchoring. Once a number is floated early in the quarter, everything else orbits around it. Even when evidence changes, forecasts rarely move far from the original anchor.

Recency bias plays a role too. A strong week convinces everyone momentum is real. A bad week gets written off as noise. The most recent signal always feels more important than it should.

And then there’s confirmation bias, the quiet killer. Forecast reviews focus on information that supports the desired outcome. Risks get downplayed. Red flags get reframed as timing issues. Nobody wants to be the person who says the deal is dead before it officially is.

These biases aren’t unique to sales. They show up in stock picking, project planning, and even weather prediction. Sales just adds quotas to the mix, which raises the stakes.

Why Sales Forecasting Is Especially Broken

Most forecasting research assumes the forecaster is neutral. Salespeople just aren’t.

A rep’s compensation, reputation, and job security are often tied to the number they’re predicting. That alone distorts judgment. Add public forecast calls, recorded CRM changes, and weekly scrutiny, and you get numbers shaped by survival instincts.

Organizational behavior research shows that when people are evaluated on predictions, they tend to shade those predictions in socially acceptable directions. In sales, that usually means optimism early and last-minute realism late.

This is why sales forecasts often look accurate in hindsight but useless in advance. The adjustments happen too late to be predictive, but just in time to explain the miss.

Why Technology Didn’t Fix This

CRMs were supposed to solve forecasting by adding data. They didn’t. They just made bias more legible.

Pipeline stages feel objective, but they’re subjective labels applied by humans. Weighted probabilities look scientific, but they’re often based on historical averages that don’t account for context. Dashboards create the appearance of precision.

AI forecasting tools promised to eliminate human error. What they actually do is train on historical data generated by biased humans. Garbage in, smarter garbage out.

Why Forecasting Persists Anyway

Given all this, it’s fair to ask why companies keep forecasting at all. The answer is simple: chaos is worse.

Forecasts exist to coordinate action. They give teams something to argue about, plan around, and measure against. A flawed forecast is still more useful than no shared expectation.

Behavioral researchers call this functional fiction. The number doesn’t need to be accurate to be useful. It needs to be believable enough to align behavior. That’s why forecasting survives every failure. It’s a management ritual.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Sales forecasting fails because it asks people to do something they’re biologically bad at while punishing them for being honest about uncertainty.
It treats confidence as competence and precision as insight. It mistakes emotional reassurance for truth.

None of this means forecasting is pointless. It means we should stop pretending it’s objective. Forecasts are stories shaped by incentives, fear, hope, and social pressure. The sooner leaders accept that, the better they can interpret the numbers.

What Sellers Think Works vs. What Actually Drives Pipeline

Hitting quota is getting harder, but it's not because sellers aren’t working hard enough. Despite record activity, teams are still falling short because there’s a growing disconnect between what teams think drives pipeline and what actually moves deals forward in 2026.

Luckily, the Commsor team has some answers for you. Join their team on January 28 for a data-driven webinar, The Warm Intro Gap, to learn how adding warm revenue to your sales strategy can help close the gap between pipeline and quota.

They’ll break down three critical gaps holding teams back, the Perception, Behavior, and Performance Gaps, and show why top sellers outperform by layering warm intros, referrals, and network activation on top of outbound.

P.S. 5 lucky attendees will receive Commsor hoodies and hats for attending! 🧢 🦕

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

In which country did the game of golf originate?

A. Germany
B. Guatemala
C. France
D. Scotland

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

I was giving a demo to a startup I’d been working for a few weeks. They were small but serious, the kind of company that moved fast and liked to remind you of it. My point of contact mentioned that their founder might sit in on the call but probably wouldn’t participate. I said that was fine.

The call started normally. I shared my screen and got into the deck. About ten minutes in, I noticed an extra Zoom tile with no camera had joined. No one introduced them, but I assumed it was the founder. I figured since he was just there to listen and didn't say anything, I'd just keep it moving. The rest of the call went fine, my POC seemed excited, and the founder didn't say anything.

After the call, I sent my usual follow-up to my contact. An hour later my manager forwarded me an email that was forwarded to him by our CEO. It was from the founder of the company I was pitching.

It detailed a bunch of notes about what he thought was wrong with our product and our pitch. Specifically, he called me out for being "amateurish." At the end of the email, he said he'd be willing to buy, but not from me, and wanted a crazy discount (it was something close to 70%). I was stunned. I called my manager immediately to explain myself. He calmed me down and let me know that the CEO didn't care and he didn't care. They both thought the founder guy was a jerk and wouldn't work with him.

Naturally, I followed the startup closely after that, praying for their downfall. I was finally vindicated last year when I found out they went out of business.

Anonymous Location Withheld

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: LinkedIn Poll -- January 2026

WORTH A PEEK

Ever notice that many of your "marketing qualified leads" turn out to be garbage? A Reddit user recently pointed out that this is a result of marketing’s KPI’s, which differ from sales, leading to a mismatch in priorities. You can see the conversion, and what you can do about it, here.

ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

I’m an AE at a Series C company selling data infrastructure to enterprise accounts. My manager expects near-instant responses on Slack. He pings me during calls and all hours of the day breaking my focus. If I don’t reply in five minutes, he pings me again and gets on my case.

It's a huge distraction and I'm constantly on edge about stepping out to walk my dog, making myself lunch, or even being in a deep work state and missing a message.

Meanwhile, approvals take forever. Pricing exceptions sit for weeks. Legal redlines deals into the ground. I’ve had multiple late-stage opportunities stall because I’m waiting on internal sign-off, not the buyer.

When I bring this up, I’m told “those things take time” and that I need to be more responsive because deals move fast.

It feels like urgency only flows one way. Is this just how sales works, or is something broken here?

Waiting in New York

Dear Waiting,

The mistake reps make is arguing about fairness. Don’t. Argue about revenue. Start documenting every stalled deal where internal latency, not buyer hesitation, is the blocker. Also, stop absorbing urgency that isn’t reciprocal. A Slack ping is not more important than a live customer call. Set expectations clearly and calmly. If leadership still treats responsiveness as a one-way street, that’s a signal about how seriously they take execution. At that point, adjust your effort—or your exit plan.

Quiz Answer: D. Golf originated in 15th century Scotland (You can read the source article here).

How did you like today's story?

Today's email was written by Ken Kupchik, Erica Furgiuele, Steve Rado, and Emily Hill.

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Advertise with us

Books

QUOTA MEDIA LLC

651 N. Broad Street., Suite 206
Middletown DELAWARE (DE) 19709
USA

Unsubscribe | Change Subscriber Options