Upselling with forecasts

A forecast is a range built from the client's own history. Used well, it creates a genuine scope conversation. Used badly, it is a promise you will be held to. The difference is entirely in how you present it.

What you'll learn

• What a forecast is and is not
• Three situations where it legitimately supports more scope
• The sentences to use, and the ones to avoid

What it is

A projection of where the client's citation rate is heading, as a range, from their own checks. It re-runs regularly, and past runs are kept so a projection can be read against what actually happened.

It is not an industry model, not a guarantee, and not the same thing as the projected lift on a change. See forecasts and ranges.

Why a range creates a better conversation than a number

A number invites haggling. A range invites a question about what narrows it, and the answer to that question is your scope: more prompts, better instrumentation, more changes actually shipped.

A widening range is also a legitimate reason to talk about scope, and it is the more honest of the two cases: the client's behaviour has become less predictable, and predictability is what the work buys.

Three honest upsell situations

1. Coverage is too narrow to forecast well. A client with fifteen prompts in one topic has a wide range because the sample is thin. More prompts, especially across their real buying journey, narrow it. The pitch is measurement quality, not optimism.

2. The loop is not closing. If most changes in the ledger are marked not measurable, the client is paying for work nobody can score. The fix is process: approvals through the ledger, a developer allocation, and a control captured every time. That is a service upsell with a provable outcome.

3. A surface is unmeasured or lost. An excluded surface or one clear laggard is a specific, bounded piece of work with a visible before and after.

The sentences

Use:

• "Your own history projects a range of X to Y over the next month. Here is what would narrow it."
• "Here is what the forecast said last month, and here is what happened."
• "Six of our last ten changes for you cannot be scored, because they shipped outside the ledger. That is the thing to fix first."

Avoid:

• "We will get you to X percent."
• "The forecast says we will gain X." A range is not a point.
• Quoting a projected lift from the plan as a forecast. They are different quantities with different bases and the platform keeps them apart deliberately.
• Any industry benchmark as a target.

Keeping it honest over time

Show the record. Open the forecast history with the client and read an old projection against the outcome, including the times it was wrong. A supplier who shows you their misses is a supplier whose next number you believe.

If the client's forecast record is thin, say that plainly: it is a statement about how much has been measured, and it is itself an argument for the scope you are proposing.

Try this in Outercite

Open Intelligence, find the oldest forecast run for a client, and read it against what happened. Take that comparison into the conversation instead of the current projection.

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