Your confidence is real… Your version of reality isn’t!

Let me tell you about a deal that closed.

Not a loss. Not a near miss. A genuine, multi-million dollar win — the kind that gets announced at the quarterly review, that earns a commission cheque, that becomes the story a seller tells about how they cracked a complex account in a competitive market.

I knew the seller well. Watched them work the deal. Saw the preparation, the stakeholder management, the persistence across a long and complicated sales cycle.

What I also knew — and what the seller never knew — was that the deal had been decided before any of that mattered.

The buyer was a large services organisation. The economic buyer was the CEO. Somewhere in the process, the CEO had communicated something to our executives that never reached the sales team: there was a significant business constraint that needed to be resolved before any purchase was possible. One that couldn't be discussed openly within the commercial process.

Our executives responded with a gesture at their level of the relationship — a commercial arrangement made quietly, understood by both parties to signal goodwill and an expectation of a favourable outcome in the bid.

The seller didn't know. Wasn't supposed to know. It was handled between executives, entirely separate from the commercial process playing out below.

The deal closed. The seller celebrated. The number hit the forecast.

And somewhere in their understanding of that win, a set of lessons formed. About what had worked. About which signals meant the deal was progressing. About what they had done — the questions asked, the relationships built, the business case constructed — that had ultimately made the difference.

Every one of those lessons was wrong.

The Lessons That Were Wrong

I've thought about that deal many times since.

Not because of what it says about the executives involved, or the commercial arrangement that was made. These things happen in enterprise sales. Relationships operate at multiple levels simultaneously. Decisions get made through channels that don't appear on any org chart.

What I keep thinking about is the seller.

A person of reasonable competence — not exceptional, I was told, but adequate — who spent months working a deal they believed they were running. Who experienced the full psychological weight of a major enterprise opportunity. Who felt the tension of competition, the uncertainty of a long qualification process, the satisfaction of a close.

And who was, in reality, a pawn.

Not in a malicious sense. Nobody was deceiving them for sport. They were simply operating at a level of the deal that was no longer the relevant level. The actual decision — the one that mattered — was being made in a room they had no access to, by people whose conversations never entered their pipeline notes.

They were, in the most precise sense of the term, a fulfilment agent. Present because the process required presence. Active because the process required activity. Irrelevant to the outcome in ways they never discovered.

The Governance Problem

Here is what troubles me about that story when I apply it to revenue governance.

Every week, CROs and CFOs sit in pipeline reviews and evaluate the health of their revenue organisations based on what their sellers believe is true about their deals. Stage progression. Stakeholder engagement. Competitive positioning. Decision timelines.

All of it filtered through the seller's understanding of what's happening.

In the deal I described, that filter was producing accurate information about a fiction. The seller genuinely believed they were managing a competitive enterprise evaluation. They were updating their CRM honestly. Their confidence level was real. Their forecast contribution was made in good faith.

It was also completely wrong — not because they were lying, not because they were incompetent, but because the information available to them bore no reliable relationship to the actual decision-making process.

Now ask yourself: how many deals in your current forecast are in the same position?

Not deals where the seller is exaggerating or sandbagging. Deals where the seller is giving you their honest read — and their honest read is built on a version of reality that excludes conversations they don't know are happening, relationships they don't have access to, and motivations they've never been given the chance to discover.

The seller in my story never found out the real reason they won. They carried their lessons forward. They built their next pipeline around the same signals. They told the story of that win at the next sales kickoff.

And somewhere in the organisation, their manager used that deal as evidence that the team could close complex enterprise accounts.

The forecast wasn't wrong because the sellers were bad. The forecast was wrong because nobody had built a system that required deals to be evaluated against verified evidence rather than seller belief.

That is a different problem. And it requires governance.

The Systematic Blindness

I am not suggesting that executive relationships are illegitimate, or that commercial arrangements between senior leaders don't happen. They do, and they always will.

What I am suggesting is that a revenue organisation that relies entirely on what sellers can see is systematically blind to the gap between what sellers believe is driving decisions and what is actually driving them.

That gap doesn't just affect individual deals. It corrupts the intelligence your entire organisation learns from its wins. Every misunderstood win produces a seller with wrong lessons. Every wrong lesson produces a pipeline built on false patterns. Every false pattern produces a forecast that looks healthy until the quarter it doesn't.

The seller in my story was not the problem. They were the symptom.

The problem was an organisation with no mechanism to ask at a level above the seller, with evidence rather than belief — what is actually happening in this deal, and why.

The Question You Need to Ask

Before your next forecast review, pull your three most confident deals. Not the ones you're worried about. The ones everyone believes are closed.

Ask a different question for each one: do we actually know why this customer is buying from us — verified, not assumed — or do we know what our seller believes about why they're buying?

The gap between those two answers is where your forecast lives.

The Solution

Deals are decisions.

Decisions require evidence.

And evidence requires governance.

Revenue Decision Governance introduces the discipline that closes this gap. It treats revenue generation as a controlled financial function rather than a variable sales activity. It introduces mandated decision standards, evidence before forecast commitment, and structured deal logic.

The goal is simple.

Revenue decisions must meet the same evidence standards as financial decisions.

Because if high-value deal decisions still rely on individual belief under pressure, value will continue to leak.