Forecast the Miss, Forge the Fix
A former team member came to me for advice last week. He's a sales leader @ big tech, and the highest performer in his org. He’s staring down an impossible sales target. We all have, or will, at some point.
What I’ve learned is that when you quantify the gap and ask for help, it changes the conversation completely. It’s not about pleading for a lower number, and not about resurfacing your brilliant ‘bottom’s up’ and I told you so. It’s about showing exactly where you’ll land if nothing changes, and what it would take to close the gap.
I’ve seen this work firsthand. Years ago, my organization was responsible for hitting KPIs across operational excellence for a global ecommerce business. The tools we had to use were homegrown, clunky, and prone to error. Heading into Q4 — the most important, stressful, and high‑stakes period in consumer retail — we could see the writing on the wall: we’d miss our quality and agility targets by a wide margin. In holiday, every hour matters and every mistake is magnified. It’s the live‑or‑die stretch for most consumer retail companies, and it was for us and our teams. Quality meant errors per page, and we were on track for about 10 times our acceptable goal. Agility meant how quickly we could make updates when new content came in — product page changes, promos — and we knew the lag would not meet the agility needed during holiday, when speed is revenue and the eyes of the entire business are on you.
Instead of waiting for the miss to happen, I laid out to my leadership chain the impact those tools were having on our team, our processes, and our output. They agreed with the assessment and the proposed approach, and asked for a meeting that included the eng team (that owns the tools). From there, I presented a plan to fill the gap — hiring more vendors to handle manual work like QA and content management. It wasn’t a small expense, but it was the only way to offset the limitations of the tools we had.
We got the budget — and not only did we hit the target, we beat it. Two other things happened as well. First, at the executive level, it put a spotlight on how much strain those homegrown systems were putting on the business. Second, it reflected well on our operational rigor — that we were tracking inputs to outputs so closely we could forecast a miss three months in advance, quantify the impact, and present a solution in time to make a difference. (To that leadership team: you know who you are. Thank you.)
That’s why I tell people: when you’re staring down a number that feels out of reach, don’t just say it’s impossible. Anticipate the gap in advance. Show the math. Show the levers. Show the plan. Ask for what’s required to fill the gap. Even if leadership (or your board, or your investor) says no, you’ve documented the reality and given them the choice. And if they say yes, you’ve got what you need to deliver.
And those levers can take many forms. It might mean asking for a policy or contract change that removes a barrier to growth, negotiating a concession that unlocks a deal, securing high‑level alignment with other teams, or getting access to extra resources. The specifics will vary, but the principle is the same: identify the constraint, quantify its impact, and make the case for the change. Of course, for this approach to work, you need to already have established credibility as a leader who builds good plans and executes them.
One other takeaway: if your leadership chain refuses to engage in your analysis and reverts to something like, “I don’t care, just hit your number,” that’s a signal you’re not in an environment where you or your teams can succeed. Even if you can’t or don’t hit your number, you need to be in a place where these discussions are possible. And if you’re the type of leader who responds to target conversations like that — stop.
