Skip to main content

​
Pre-board-meeting forecast prep

​
The play

It’s Tuesday. The board meeting is Thursday morning. Your CRO needs a forecast number she can defend, which means the underlying pipeline data needs to be clean before she runs the rollup. You own 22 open Negotiation deals and another 14 in Proposal, and any deal with a stale close date, a missing amount, or a missing next step is going to surface as a soft number when the board asks. This play walks the manager-or-AE workflow for a defensible forecast read: you scrub the hygiene scorecard, fix the worst per-deal entries, and use Home chat to assemble the quarter-over-quarter story you’ll tell on Thursday.

​
Step-by-step

  1. Open Pipeline Hygiene and read the org scorecard. The three KPI cards at the top give you the headline: org hygiene score, total reps, rules tracked. If the org score is below 70, your forecast is already on shaky ground, the board will see it the moment your CRO mentions data quality.
Pipeline Hygiene dashboard showing org hygiene KPI cards and the per-rep table.
  1. Toggle into Zero Board mode. This flips the rep table into a flat list of every open opportunity scoring exactly 0 across the team. These are the deals dragging the org number down the most: overdue close dates, missing amounts, no next step, no linked account. Sort the list, identify the ones that affect your own quarter forecast, and copy the deal names into a scratchpad.
  2. Drill into your own rep page for the trajectory. Click your row in the rep table to load Pipeline Hygiene per-rep drill-in. The 30-day chart tells you whether your hygiene is trending up or down going into the meeting, that’s the defensible story you can tell (“we cleaned 12 entries this week, score is up from 64 to 78”).
Per-rep Pipeline Hygiene page with 30-day trajectory chart and worst-first opportunity list.
  1. Open Opportunities and fix the risky per-deal entries. Load a saved view filtered to your Negotiation and Proposal slice (or build one on the fly). Walk the rows that came up on the Zero Board: update the close date if it slipped, populate the next step inline, accept any pending AI Suggestions for the amount or champion fields. Each accepted suggestion writes back to Salesforce in one round-trip, so the hygiene number recomputes on the next refresh.
  2. Flip to the kanban for a final stage-level read. Toggle Layout to Board on Opportunities. Currency totals per lane should now reflect your cleaned numbers. If a deal is in the wrong stage, drag it to the right one; the Salesforce write rounds back through and the kanban total updates in place.
Opportunities kanban board with stage lanes and per-lane currency totals.
  1. Use Home chat to compute the quarter delta. Open the chat and ask: “Compute pipeline value at the start of the quarter vs. now, broken down by stage.” The chat reads across opportunities and gives you the deltas you need for the board narrative (“Negotiation pipeline is up 1.4MsinceApril1;Proposalisdown1.4M since April 1; Proposal is down 600K because we closed three deals out of it”).
Home chat with an active conversation showing a quarter-over-quarter pipeline delta query and the AI's stage-by-stage response with dollar changes per stage.
  1. Save the chat thread as your forecast brief. Rename the thread “Board prep, Q2 forecast” and keep it open. On Thursday morning before the meeting, reopen the thread to refresh the numbers; the chat reasons across the same data so the delta stays current.

​
What to expect

You walk into Thursday with a hygiene score you can name, a per-deal scrub you can defend, a stage-by-stage delta against the start of the quarter, and a thread you can reopen if the board asks a follow-up. The whole prep takes 30 to 45 minutes spread over Tuesday and Wednesday; the old version was a half-day of Salesforce report-building plus a spreadsheet reconciliation pass.

​
Variations

  • If you’re the CRO running this across the whole team, start on Pipeline Hygiene sorted worst-first, drill into the two lowest-scoring AEs first, and have each of them run this play on their own book before the rollup.
  • If your board cares more about close-date accuracy than amount accuracy, tune the hygiene rules in the rules dialog so overdue-close-date carries a heavier penalty; the score recomputes everywhere in real time.
  • For monthly cadence (sales leadership review, not a board meeting), skip the Home chat quarter delta step and just run the hygiene scrub plus the per-deal fix loop.
  • Pipeline Hygiene - the dashboard this play opens on; the org scorecard, Zero Board, and per-rep drill-in all live there.
  • Opportunities - the workspace where steps 4 and 5 fix the risky entries and confirm the cleaned numbers on the kanban board.
  • Home - the chat surface step 6 uses for the quarter-over-quarter delta narrative.
  • Monday morning pipeline review - the weekly-cadence sibling; this play extends the same surfaces into a deeper board-prep pass.
  • Weekly close-the-loop review - the manager Friday-ritual companion that reads Activity History and AI Activity alongside hygiene.
  • Confirm Salesforce sync end of day - the close-the-loop play to run after fixing per-deal entries so the writes round-trip cleanly before the board sees them.