interested, compelled, committed
Earlier in my career, I was in strategic sales at an enterprise software company, working my own territory and supporting the senior execs on theirs. Every last month of the quarter, forecasting got real. The strategic director had to tell the European sales lead what the number would actually be. The European lead had to tell the global chief revenue officer. The pipeline rolled up three levels before it landed on a board slide. I sat in the level one reviews, where the deals got sorted before anything rolled up the chain.
The problem wasn't effort. Every rep had a full pipeline. Every deal had a stage and a CRM amount. By the last month of the quarter, that wasn't enough. "Pipeline" as a word wasn't useful. It mixed three different things that behaved nothing like each other.
Interested prospects had taken demos and said the product was impressive. They'd asked about pricing, then resurfaced six weeks later, saying the timing wasn't right. Those deals lived in the CRM with stage labels that looked like progress, but labels aren't commitments.
Compelled prospects had a real problem. It was costing them something quantifiable, and the cost was going up each week the problem wasn't solved. They would buy. The question was when. Compelled deals are often closed, but not always in the quarter they'd been forecasted in. Budget cycles shifted, champions left.
Committed prospects had the problem, the urgency, and a decision window that fell inside the quarter. Someone in the buying room had the authority to say yes. A specific decision date was on the table, often tied to a compliance deadline or allocated budget pending the demo. These were the deals the directors committed to the forecast. Lose a committed deal, and you were on the hook to explain why. Gain an interested deal, and nobody cared. That was the asymmetry.
The sort also told the execs where to put their time. A committed deal was their job for the quarter. They stayed fully on top of every committed deal because losing credibility on one by overcommitting and missing meant they were done. Sales directors further up the chain could smell BS a mile away. Commission compounded up the line. Every role, from the rep to the regional lead, made money when deals closed. That's why the whole chain stayed focused on real deals.
The job of the last month was sorting the three. Not growing pipeline, not running more meetings. Just asking, deal by deal, "Is this compelled or committed?" and being honest about the answer. Commission was tied to individual deals closing, and the pull to call an interested one compelled because you liked the prospect, which was real. What kept you honest was that no commission got paid until the PO was issued.
My own mantra went further. I didn't count a deal as real until the money hit my bank. Probably a bit too cynical, but it kept me from padding my own pipeline. If the wishful pipeline flowed up to the CRO, the quarter came in soft, and the miss rolled forward. Targets were annualised, which meant one soft quarter made the rest of the year harder.
Predictability was the name of the game.
Most founder-led sales pipelines don't carry this distinction. They carry interest as if it were a pipeline. The founder can tell you every deal has activity and a next step logged. What they can't tell you is which of those deals are actually committed and which are just attention dressed up as a pipeline. So the forecast is a list of hopes with dollar amounts attached.
The test is simple. Go through your current pipeline, deal by deal, and answer three questions for each one:
Does this prospect have a specific problem that's costing them something measurable?
Is there a specific pressure (a deadline or a measurable consequence) that makes the problem need to be solved within this quarter?
Does someone in the buying room have the authority to say yes without escalating?
Three yeses is a committed deal. Fewer than three is compelled at best, interested at worst.
When you run this, the pipeline shrinks. That's uncomfortable. It also stops lying to you. A founder with four committed deals and six compelled ones has a forecast. A founder with forty "opportunities" that haven't been filtered has a spreadsheet with hope in the amount column.
Predictability was the name of the game. It still is. A pipeline that doesn't separate committed from interested is a CRM in disguise.