The Forecast Courtroom is a leadership session run as a trial. Deals from the company’s own history are argued in front of the room, each person records a private verdict, and the verdicts are then compared against what actually happened and what it cost. It produces a calibration record for the leadership team.
Call Your Shot is built for a full kickoff floor. The Courtroom is built for the people who own the number. Real deals go on the stand. The room votes. Then the verdicts meet the outcome.
Nobody loses face for changing their mind about a deal that is already closed, so the room tells the truth. And the record of who was right is created in front of everyone, rather than asserted afterwards.
What it paid to be wrong. Which people called deals correctly while the room was still committing. And where sellers and engineers diverge on identical evidence.
Built around your own cases, prepared in advance with your leaders. Suited to a leadership room, a quarterly business review, or a kickoff leadership track rather than a main stage.
Every forecast call has the same flaw built into it. The people arguing about a deal are the people carrying it, and the answer is not knowable yet, so the conversation turns into a contest of conviction. The most confident person tends to win, and nobody finds out whether they were right until the quarter is already spent.
A closed deal removes both problems at once. The outcome exists, so a verdict can be scored rather than debated. And the quarter it belonged to is over, so no one in the room is defending a number they still have to hit.
A closed deal is the only deal a leadership team can be honest about, because the quarter it belonged to is already spent.
What goes on the stand is the evidence as it stood at a point in time, before the outcome was known. The room argues from that, commits privately, and only then finds out what happened and what it cost.
Sales leadership and presales leadership in the same room is the point. Most calibration exercises run inside one function, which produces agreement that means very little, because the two groups were never looking at the deal the same way to begin with.
In an ongoing benchmark of how sales engineering teams run deals, ninety two percent of engineers say something when they are fairly sure a deal is not real. Sixty one percent of those formal warnings change nothing, and eighty nine percent travel to the account executive and no further.
That is the gap the Courtroom makes visible. If an engineer called three of the night’s deals correctly while the room was still committing, the question for leadership is no longer whether engineers see things early. It is what happened to those reads last year, and why none of them reached the forecast.
A session that produces a good conversation and nothing else has a shelf life measured in days. The written finding is what gives leadership something to run on once the kickoff is over.
Run it again in two quarters on a different set of deals and the two records can be compared. That is the closest thing a revenue team gets to measuring whether its judgment improved.
Leaders generally believe they know who reads deals well. The record either confirms that or quietly corrects it, in front of everyone, using deals the company already paid for.
When the same pattern shows up on a live deal in March, there is now a shared reference for it. The argument stops being about optimism and starts being about evidence the room has already scored once.
This is built for a room of leaders rather than a main stage. At a kickoff it can run as an optional leadership track alongside the main agenda, booked separately from the floor session rather than as part of it. It also runs well as part of a quarterly business review or a leadership offsite, where there is time to argue properly.
For a full kickoff floor, where the aim is energy and participation across hundreds of people, Call Your Shot is the format. The mechanism is the same. The room, the pace and what you walk out with are different.
The Forecast Courtroom is a leadership session run as a trial. Deals from the company’s own closed history are argued in front of the room, each person records a private verdict, and the verdicts are then compared against what actually happened and what it cost. It produces a written calibration record for the leadership team.
Because a closed deal has a knowable answer and no forecast consequence. Nobody in the room is defending a number they still have to hit, so the room argues honestly, and every verdict can be scored against the real outcome rather than debated.
A forecast call asks people to defend a position they own. A trial asks them to judge one that is already settled. That single change removes the incentive to be confident and replaces it with an incentive to be right.
The people who own the number, with sales and presales leadership in the same room. Running calibration inside one function produces agreement that means little, because the two groups were never reading the deal the same way.
Thirty minutes to work out whether this fits the room you have in mind, and which of your own deals would go on the stand.