Your Sales Forecast Is Lying to You

Every quarter it’s the same story: the commit looks solid, the CRO feels good, the board’s been told the number, and then four deals slip. Nobody lied. The rep just never had visibility into what the buyer was actually doing.

In this session, Airspeed VP of Sales Thang Nguyen sits down with Doug May, a 30-year go-to-market leader who’s sat in the CRO seat and advised the CROs at Splunk, Databricks, Datadog, and Harness, to unpack why forecasting breaks down inside revenue orgs and what it actually takes to fix it.

Then Airspeed product engineer Alex Painter demos how agentic AI scores every deal on real buyer signals, flags risk weeks before close, and gives leaders a number they can defend in the board meeting.

What you’ll learn

• Why activity and sentiment make forecasts “structured guessing”, and what buyer behavior tells you instead
• Where the reporting chain distorts the number (the game of telephone from rep → manager → CRO → board)
• How emotional attachment and career risk quietly bias every forecast call
• How to judge deals on customer signals, not internal optimism
• A live look at Airspeed reading calls, emails, and CRM data to assign real close probabilities

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction to sales forecasting challenges
• 04:30 Understanding the importance of accurate forecasting
• 12:42 The role of human judgment in forecasting
• 18:55 Identifying breakdowns in the forecasting process
• 21:24 The importance of honest forecasting
• 24:10 Navigating pipeline reviews
• 27:16 The high stakes of sales forecasting
• 30:48 Introducing Airspeed’s approach
• 32:04 Harnessing AI for better forecasting
• 39:25 Engaging with Airspeed’s solutions

Who this is for

Sales leaders, RevOps, and anyone who’s ever sat in a pipeline review and thought “these numbers don’t feel right.”

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