In 1891, Arthur Conan Doyle published A Scandal in Bohemia, a short story featuring his now-famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. Within its pages is a remarkably perceptive observation about human reasoning, one that arguably deserves a place in every sales manager’s office. Holmes explains to Dr Watson that one of the greatest mistakes an investigator can make is to develop a theory before establishing the facts. Once somebody becomes attached to an explanation, they begin unconsciously selecting and interpreting information that supports it. More than 130 years later, sales organisations are making precisely the same mistake. Except instead of investigating mysterious disappearances and stolen documents, they’re attempting to understand opportunities, interpret buyer behaviour and forecast revenue. A salesperson comes away from a meeting convinced that the opportunity is progressing. The buyer was enthusiastic, asked sensible questions and appeared genuinely impressed by the product. They even suggested involving a colleague in the next conversation. The salesperson updates the CRM, increases the probability of closing and confidently informs their manager that things are looking promising. Their manager, delighted by the prospect of another opportunity moving through the pipeline, asks a few questions, accepts the assessment and incorporates the expected revenue into the forecast. Neither person has necessarily done anything dishonest. Both might genuinely believe the opportunity is progressing exactly as described. Yet beneath their confidence lies an uncomfortable possibility: much of what they believe about the opportunity might be an interpretation rather than a fact. The buyer’s enthusiasm has been interpreted as purchasing intent. Their willingness to attend another meeting has become evidence of commitment. A friendly relationship has been mistaken for internal influence, while an anticipated decision date has somehow transformed into an agreed purchasing deadline. Before long, a series of assumptions has acquired the appearance of commercial certainty. And therein lies one of the most persistent problems in modern sales management. Organisations have become extraordinarily sophisticated at collecting and reporting pipeline information, but they are not always particularly good at distinguishing what they know from what they merely believe. The difference between seeing and believing Sherlock Holmes has become synonymous with observation, deduction and an almost supernatural ability to recognise details that everyone else overlooks. Yet the real strength of his fictional method lies in something rather less glamorous: his willingness to question the explanations that other people instinctively accept. In A Scandal in Bohemia, Holmes warns Watson against constructing a theory before collecting sufficient information. It’s a useful distinction because human beings rarely experience the world as a neutral collection of facts. We interpret what we observe, attach meaning to events and construct explanations that help us make sense of what is happening. This process is entirely natural. Without it, even the simplest decisions would become exhausting. The difficulty arises when we forget that our interpretations are not necessarily accurate. Consider a relatively common sales scenario. A salesperson has spent several weeks speaking with a prospective customer. The conversations have been productive, the buyer has asked for pricing, and a senior stakeholder attended the most recent demonstration. Ask the salesperson what they know about the opportunity, and they might confidently explain that the business has a genuine requirement, senior leadership is engaged and the opportunity is likely to close before the end of the quarter. But consider what has actually been observed. The buyer attended several meetings. They requested pricing. A senior stakeholder participated in a demonstration. Those are facts, assuming they have been accurately recorded. The existence of an approved project, the senior stakeholder’s decision-making authority and the likelihood of purchasing this quarter are interpretations. They may be perfectly reasonable interpretations, but they remain unverified until additional information supports them. This distinction matters enormously because a plausible explanation is not the same thing as a proven explanation. A buyer might request pricing because they’re preparing a business case, comparing alternatives, satisfying an internal requirement or simply trying to understand the market. A senior stakeholder might attend a demonstration because they’re sponsoring the initiative, because they’ve been asked to provide technical oversight, or because their diary happened to be free. The behaviour is real. Its meaning remains uncertain. Good selling requires us to explore that uncertainty rather than automatically selecting the explanation we would most like to be true. Why we believe what we want to believe Psychologists have spent decades investigating our tendency to favour information that supports existing beliefs. In 1998, psychologist Raymond Nickerson published an extensive review of confirmation bias in the Review of General Psychology. His work examined how people selectively seek, interpret and evaluate information in ways that reinforce their existing expectations. The implications for selling are significant. Once a salesperson becomes convinced that an opportunity will close, information that supports this belief can become disproportionately influential. Positive feedback is treated as meaningful evidence, while contradictory information is explained away as an insignificant obstacle. A buyer’s enthusiasm is remembered. Their reluctance to discuss the approval process receives less attention. An encouraging email is shared with the manager. The fact that the Economic Buyer has repeatedly declined to engage is presented as a minor scheduling difficulty. The salesperson might interpret an extended evaluation as evidence that the customer is taking the purchase seriously, even when the absence of an agreed decision process suggests the opposite. Crucially, this is not necessarily a conscious attempt to manipulate the forecast. The salesperson may be just as convinced by the narrative as everyone else. And the more time they invest in an opportunity, the harder it can become to question that narrative. After months of conversations, demonstrations, internal meetings and commercial negotiations, accepting that an opportunity lacks sufficient momentum can feel like acknowledging that a substantial investment of effort has produced very little progress. Optimism becomes psychologically attractive because the alternative is uncomfortable. We should be careful not to confuse this with a lack of intelligence or professionalism. Confirmation bias is not something that exclusively affects inexperienced or poorly trained salespeople. It is a feature of human reasoning that can influence experienced professionals across almost every discipline. Indeed, experience can sometimes make the problem more difficult to recognise. An experienced salesperson may have developed an extensive collection of stories, patterns and previous successes that appear to justify their instincts. They’ve seen opportunities like this close before. They recognise the buyer’s enthusiasm. They’ve worked with similar organisations. They know how these things tend to unfold. That accumulated experience can be genuinely valuable, but it can also create confidence that exceeds the quality of the available evidence. The confidence trap Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, spent much of his career exploring the relationship between judgement, confidence and accuracy. One particularly relevant contribution came in a 2009 paper co-authored with psychologist Gary Klein, titled Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree. The researchers examined when professional intuition should be trusted and when it is likely to be unreliable. Their central argument was that intuitive expertise develops most effectively in environments with sufficiently predictable patterns and opportunities to receive meaningful feedback. Importantly, feeling confident about a judgement is not reliable evidence that the judgement is correct. This distinction should concern anyone responsible for managing a sales forecast. Experienced salespeople often rely on intuition when assessing opportunities. They’ll describe a meeting as having gone well, explain that the buyer appears serious or claim they have a strong feeling about an expected outcome. None of these observations is necessarily worthless. Experienced professionals can recognise patterns that less experienced colleagues overlook. However, complex B2B selling presents a particular challenge. Purchasing decisions involve multiple stakeholders, changing commercial priorities, internal politics, competing investments and information that the salesperson may never fully see. Furthermore, the feedback required to develop accurate intuition can be inconsistent. An opportunity might close despite poor qualification because the customer had already decided to purchase. Another might be lost despite excellent execution because the organisation unexpectedly froze its spending. If managers fail to examine why opportunities succeed or fail, salespeople can develop considerable experience without necessarily developing proportionately better judgement. They might become highly confident in their ability to read a buyer while remaining surprisingly poor at predicting purchasing behaviour. Which raises an important question: when a salesperson tells their manager that they’re 90% confident an opportunity will close, what exactly does that percentage represent? Is it based on historical outcomes from comparable opportunities? Is it supported by verified customer commitments, an agreed decision process and a clear commercial justification? Or is it simply a numerical expression of how optimistic the salesperson happens to feel? There’s a considerable difference. How assumptions become organisational truths Perhaps the most concerning aspect of the problem is what happens after an assumption enters the CRM. Consider the following hypothetical sequence. A salesperson finishes a discovery meeting in which the customer explains that improving sales productivity is a major organisational priority. The customer is interested in exploring solutions and suggests that the business would ideally like to make progress before the end of the financial year. The salesperson interprets this as evidence of a compelling event. The CRM is updated to reflect a target close date of 15 December. The opportunity advances to the next stage, and the salesperson enters an estimated contract value of £120,000. During the following pipeline review, the manager asks whether the customer is looking to make a decision in December. The salesperson confirms that this is the current expectation, based on the earlier conversation. The manager accepts the explanation. A few days later, the opportunity appears in the regional forecast. The regional director sees £120,000 of expected revenue associated with a December close date and assumes the opportunity has been appropriately qualified. By the time that information reaches the senior leadership team, the original customer conversation has been transformed into something that looks remarkably like a commercial commitment. Yet the customer may never have agreed to purchase anything by December. They may not have approved a budget, established a decision-making process or even determined whether the business problem is sufficiently important to justify changing anything. The date originally represented the salesperson’s interpretation of a customer’s aspiration. But repeated inclusion in reporting systems has gradually made it appear more authoritative. The CRM has not invented the assumption. It has simply given the assumption structure, consistency and credibility. This is an important distinction because technology can improve the accessibility and organisation of commercial information without necessarily improving its underlying accuracy. A dashboard can display a beautifully formatted forecast that is fundamentally built on conjecture. Artificial intelligence adds another interesting dimension. Tools that summarise customer conversations, identify buying signals and recommend forecast probabilities may improve visibility, but they cannot automatically resolve ambiguity in the underlying evidence. If a customer says they hope to make a decision this quarter, an AI-generated summary might accurately capture that statement. It does not follow that the customer has the authority, resources or organisational alignment necessary to make it happen. The danger is not that technology is inherently misleading. It is that increasingly sophisticated systems can encourage us to mistake the appearance of precision for genuine certainty. The sales manager’s uncomfortable contribution It’s tempting to place responsibility for inaccurate forecasts entirely on salespeople. After all, they’re the individuals speaking with customers, updating CRM records and providing the information on which forecasts depend. But this overlooks a fundamental problem: sales managers frequently have their own reasons for believing the most optimistic interpretation of events. Consider the pressures facing a manager approaching the end of a difficult quarter. The team is behind target, several expected opportunities have slipped, and senior leadership is requesting increasingly detailed updates about the likelihood of achieving the number. In that environment, a salesperson presenting a positive assessment of an important opportunity may be offering exactly the reassurance the manager wants to hear. The manager asks whether the buyer is engaged. The salesperson says yes. They ask whether the opportunity is likely to close this quarter. The salesperson explains that they’re confident. They ask whether there are any major obstacles. The salesperson acknowledges a few outstanding details but assures them that nothing appears particularly concerning. The manager leaves the conversation encouraged. However, have they actually learned anything meaningful about the customer’s purchasing process? Or have they simply established that the salesperson remains optimistic? This is where sales management becomes particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias. Managers are not detached observers examining opportunities from a position of complete neutrality. They have targets, expectations, personal incentives and emotional investments of their own. If a manager needs an opportunity to close, they may become increasingly receptive to evidence suggesting that it will. More concerningly, managers can unintentionally train their teams to present confidence rather than uncertainty. Imagine a salesperson who consistently receives positive reinforcement when describing opportunities enthusiastically, but faces frustration or criticism when raising doubts about the forecast. Over time, that salesperson may learn that expressing optimism is professionally safer than acknowledging uncertainty. Even without explicit pressure to exaggerate, the culture begins rewarding the appearance of control rather than the quality of judgement. The result is a strange inversion of good management. Instead of using opportunity reviews to discover what the organisation doesn’t yet know, managers and salespeople use them to reassure one another that everything is proceeding according to plan. The pipeline review becomes an exercise in defending a narrative rather than investigating reality. Are we coaching or conducting interrogations? There is, of course, an obvious danger in responding to this problem by simply making pipeline reviews more aggressive. Some organisations attempt to improve qualification by encouraging managers to challenge every salesperson’s assumptions, interrogate every forecast and demand increasingly detailed evidence of progression. While more rigorous questioning can be valuable, treating every opportunity review as a cross-examination creates problems of its own. If salespeople feel that acknowledging uncertainty will expose them to criticism, they’re less likely to admit what they don’t know. They might arrive at meetings armed with explanations designed to defend their forecasts rather than questions they genuinely want help answering. This defeats the purpose of coaching. A good manager should be able to challenge a salesperson’s interpretation without challenging their competence or integrity. Rather than asking, “Why haven’t you confirmed the budget?”, they might explore how the salesperson arrived at the conclusion that funding was available. Instead of demanding to know why the Economic Buyer hasn’t been engaged, they could ask what evidence suggests that the existing contact possesses the authority to approve the investment. The difference is subtle but important. In one situation, the manager is attempting to establish whether the salesperson has completed the expected activities. In the other, they’re helping the salesperson examine the reasoning behind their conclusions. Consider how differently an opportunity review might unfold if a manager began with a simple question: “What do we actually know about this opportunity, and what are we assuming?” This creates room for a more useful conversation. The salesperson might acknowledge that the buyer has confirmed a significant operational challenge but has not yet quantified the commercial impact. They might explain that their contact appears influential but that they haven’t established whether the individual is willing to advocate internally. They might recognise that the expected decision date has been inferred from the customer’s desired implementation timeline rather than agreed through an explicit purchasing plan. None of these discoveries makes the salesperson less capable. On the contrary, recognising uncertainty is often the first step towards doing something useful about it. And rather than simply exposing gaps, a good coaching conversation should help the salesperson determine what to do next. What questions need to be asked? Which stakeholders need to be engaged? What evidence would strengthen the current assessment? What might cause us to reconsider whether this opportunity deserves continued investment? The objective is not to eliminate assumptions altogether. That would be practically impossible. It is to ensure that assumptions remain visible, open to challenge and subject to further investigation. The difference between activity and progress One of the more subtle ways assumptions influence pipeline management is through our interpretation of activity. Sales organisations have historically placed considerable emphasis on measuring inputs: calls, emails, meetings, demonstrations, proposals and other indicators of sales activity. These measures can be useful, particularly when evaluating whether teams are creating sufficient opportunities. However, activity becomes problematic when it is treated as a proxy for customer commitment. A salesperson might conduct six meetings with a prospective customer without meaningfully improving their understanding of the customer’s purchasing intentions. A demonstration may go exceptionally well while doing little to influence the organisation’s decision criteria. A detailed proposal might be delivered to an enthusiastic contact who lacks the authority or political capital to progress it internally. These activities can create an impression of momentum because something is visibly happening. But sales activity and buyer progress are not interchangeable. One belongs to the salesperson. The other belongs to the customer. We could argue that one of the most important responsibilities of a sales manager is helping their team understand this distinction. Instead of asking what the salesperson did last week, managers should also investigate what has changed within the customer’s organisation as a consequence. Has the customer agreed that the business problem is commercially significant? Have they involved additional stakeholders? Have they committed resources to the evaluation? Have they agreed to a process for reaching a decision? Even these indicators require context. A customer agreeing to another meeting is not necessarily evidence of meaningful progression, just as requesting a proposal does not automatically demonstrate purchasing intent. The task is to understand the significance of the customer’s actions, supported by what the customer has actually communicated and committed to. Ultimately, an opportunity should be considered healthier because the evidence supporting a purchase has improved, not simply because the salesperson has been busy. A better standard of evidence None of this means that sales organisations should abandon judgement, intuition or professional interpretation. Selling would become painfully bureaucratic if every conversation required documentary proof of every customer statement. Nor does evidence provide certainty. Customers can change their minds, budgets can disappear, priorities can shift and previously credible commitments can unravel. Evidence-based qualification is not about pretending that uncertainty can be eliminated. It’s about making commercial judgements that are proportionate to the information available. For example, a salesperson might reasonably believe that a particular stakeholder could become a strong Champion. Perhaps the individual has demonstrated considerable enthusiasm, offered useful organisational insight and introduced the salesperson to several colleagues. Those observations justify further investigation. They do not necessarily prove that the individual has the influence, motivation or willingness to advocate for the solution when the salesperson is absent. Similarly, a buyer expressing a desire to implement a solution before a particular date provides a useful indication of potential urgency. But a compelling event becomes considerably more credible when the seller understands the business outcome attached to that date, the person accountable for achieving it and the consequences of missing it. This is where qualification methodologies such as MEDDPICC can be valuable, provided they’re used as frameworks for critical thinking rather than administrative checklists. The purpose of identifying an Economic Buyer isn’t simply to populate a field in the CRM. It’s to establish who has the authority and accountability for the commercial decision. Understanding the Decision Process means more than recording that a decision is expected next month. It involves determining how the organisation will evaluate its options, who will participate and what must happen before a commitment can be made. Identifying a Champion is not about finding somebody who likes the product. It’s about understanding whether an individual can and will influence the organisation on the seller’s behalf. The distinction matters because a methodology cannot protect an organisation from poor reasoning if people are allowed to substitute their assumptions for the evidence it is designed to uncover. A fully completed qualification scorecard can be just as misleading as an incomplete one if the answers are based on untested beliefs. What would Sherlock Holmes ask in a pipeline review? If Holmes were to sit alongside a sales manager reviewing an important opportunity, it’s difficult to imagine him being particularly interested in whether the salesperson felt positive about the latest meeting. He would probably be more concerned with the reasoning that produced that conclusion. What was actually said? What did the customer do? Which observations support the current interpretation? What alternative explanations might account for the same behaviour? And, perhaps most importantly, what information would cause us to reconsider our assessment? That final question deserves more attention than it typically receives. Salespeople are frequently encouraged to identify the next action required to progress an opportunity. Far less frequently are they asked what evidence would demonstrate that the opportunity is unlikely to progress at all. Yet a healthy pipeline requires both. If the buyer cannot establish a meaningful commercial justification, if the supposed Champion is unwilling to introduce decision-makers, or if the organisation repeatedly fails to commit to a purchasing process, at what point should we reconsider the opportunity’s qualification? Without clear thinking about the evidence that would challenge our beliefs, opportunities can remain active indefinitely, sustained by a succession of encouraging conversations and optimistic explanations. The same principle applies to managers evaluating their own forecasts. Rather than simply asking which opportunities are expected to close, they should be prepared to examine what could make their current predictions wrong. This requires an environment where uncertainty is not treated as a weakness and where changing one’s mind in response to new information is recognised as a sign of good judgement. A salesperson who reduces the forecast value of an opportunity after discovering that the customer lacks an approved budget may have made a valuable contribution to forecast accuracy. A manager who celebrates that discovery, rather than punishing the individual for delivering disappointing news, is helping to build an organisation capable of making better commercial decisions. The real purpose of pipeline management We often describe pipeline management as a process for increasing visibility, improving forecast accuracy and ensuring that opportunities progress towards a successful outcome. These are legitimate objectives, but they can distract from something more fundamental. The quality of a pipeline ultimately depends on the quality of the judgements that sit behind it. We can invest in increasingly sophisticated CRMs, introduce AI-powered forecasting, develop elaborate qualification frameworks and require salespeople to complete extensive opportunity documentation. All of these investments may be useful. But if the information entering those systems is based on assumptions that nobody is willing to challenge, we’re simply becoming more efficient at organising our misconceptions. Perhaps the most valuable thing a sales manager can do is create a culture in which evidence matters more than optimism, curiosity matters more than certainty, and discovering that an opportunity is weaker than previously believed is treated as progress rather than failure. This doesn’t mean abandoning ambition or encouraging pessimism. Great salespeople need confidence, resilience and the capacity to pursue opportunities despite uncertainty. But confidence and critical thinking should reinforce one another, not compete. A salesperson should be able to believe an opportunity is worth pursuing while recognising that important aspects of the customer’s situation remain unknown. A manager should be able to support their team’s ambitions without allowing the pressure to achieve a number to distort their interpretation of reality. And an organisation should be able to distinguish between a forecast that reflects genuine customer evidence and one that merely represents the collective optimism of its sales team. The uncomfortable truth is that a pipeline can look healthy long before the underlying customer evidence justifies that confidence. Sherlock Holmes understood the dangers of constructing an explanation and then searching for information to support it. Sales organisations face a remarkably similar challenge. We develop a view of an opportunity, construct a narrative around its likely outcome and gradually become attached to the story we’ve created. The answer isn’t to stop forming hypotheses. They’re essential to selling. The answer is to remain willing to test them, challenge them and, when the evidence demands it, abandon them. Because the purpose of a pipeline review shouldn’t be to establish whether we like the story we’re telling ourselves. It should be to establish whether the evidence gives us a good reason to believe it. Aaron Evans 26 October 2026 Share : URL has been copied successfully!