Sales forecasts: how credible is an expected signing date?
In high-value-added selling, the expected signing date informs cash-flow planning, capacity decisions and the allocation of specialists. The management question is specific: how can we check whether that date represents a forecast rather than a favourable scenario?
What the literature establishes
Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross (1994, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that people can underestimate their completion times even when previous experience should encourage greater caution. Their studies link this planning fallacy to a focus on the anticipated course of a task rather than on past outcomes. They do not examine commercial contract signing, but they provide a relevant mechanism for scrutinising such forecasts.
The inside scenario and the outside reference
Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo (1993, Management Science) offer a theoretical analysis of how cautious choices can coexist with optimistic forecasts. They distinguish a perspective centred on a project's specific features from one grounded in the outcomes of comparable situations. Applied to selling, this distinction suggests checking the timeline proposed for a deal against the actual durations observed for similar deals.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that all expected timelines should simply be extended. That would replace a favourable assumption with an arbitrary buffer, without necessarily improving the forecast. The more useful task is to identify documented factors that justify expecting a deal to progress faster or slower than the reference cases. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
These studies do not establish that historical comparisons automatically improve signing forecasts in banking, fashion or trading. Sales records can themselves be misleading if dates are repeatedly overwritten or only won deals are retained. A useful comparison therefore requires stable definitions, archived initial forecasts and visibility of lost and still-open deals.
A practical check in Lugano
As part of SHR's « Vente à forte valeur ajoutée » programme, an exercise in Lugano could involve freezing the first expected signing date for each deal, together with its supporting reasons, over an observation period defined in advance. For teams in banking, fashion, trading and Italian-speaking family SMEs, deals would be compared within relevant categories rather than pooled into a single local average. The measure would be the proportion of deals signed on or before their initially forecast date, among all deals whose forecast date has now passed; lost and still-open deals would remain in the denominator. Comparing this proportion with relevant historical timelines would help assess the credibility of the schedule, without treating the indicator as proof of training effectiveness. To go further: explore the High-Value Selling training in Lugano in the canton of Ticino, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: High-Value Selling in Lugano
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