Executive Summary

Use this path when you need the number, the records behind it, and the confidence to share it. Leadership work in the CRM is a reading discipline, not a data-entry discipline: the sales team writes the records, the Proposal Engine and Service Dashboard feed them automatically, and your job is to read the rollup, verify it against the records underneath, and only then let the number leave the building. A dashboard total you cannot trace to records is not a number — it is a guess with formatting.

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Start Here

1. Open the dashboard.
2. Filter by business unit, owner, date, or league.
3. Ask Scout for the record list behind the number.
4. Open the records and verify stage, amount, close date, owner, and Bid Status.

Scenario 1: The Monday Number

Board call at 11. You need open pipeline by vertical — Technology, Venue Services, Media & Sponsorship — and you need to trust it.

Start with the dashboard, not with a request to the sales team. The rollups read live from the same opportunity records the reps maintain, so the dashboard is already as current as the CRM itself. Filter to the current year and the vertical in question, then do the one thing that separates a verified number from a hopeful one: drill into the records.

Open the list behind the total and scan for the four hygiene failures that inflate or deflate a pipeline number:

• Missing close dates — deals that never expire and never convert, padding the pipeline forever.
• Stale Bid Status — a bid submitted five weeks ago with no follow-up recorded is probably decided; the record just does not know it yet.
• No owner — an unowned deal is nobody's forecast and nobody's follow-up.
• Wrong-year revenue — multi-year deals carry per-year splits; a total that ignores the split books next year's delivery into this year's number.

What good looks like: you walk into the call able to say what the number is, what is in it, and which two or three records you already discounted. That last part is what makes the rest credible.

Common mistake: quoting the dashboard without opening a single record. The rollup is honest about the data it has — it cannot be honest about the data the team forgot to update.

Scenario 2: The Forecast Question

Finance asks what is realistically landing this year. Pipeline is not forecast — you need the probability-weighted view.

ANC's forecast convention is to take deals at 50% probability and above seriously and treat the rest as early pipeline. Probability is set automatically from Bid Status as a deal moves through the flow — RFP Received and Scoping sit low, Bid Submitted and Shortlisted climb, Won is certainty. On top of that, reps can record their own judgment in a separate confidence field, which is deliberately distinct: the automatic number reflects where the deal is, the rep's confidence reflects what they believe. When the two disagree sharply, that is a conversation, not a data error.

Two more rules keep the forecast honest:

• Fiscal year equals calendar year. No off-cycle mental math.
• Multi-year deals split by year. A stadium build that delivers across two seasons contributes each year's share to each year's forecast — never the whole contract to the year it was signed.

For the delivered-but-not-done view, use the backlog: won deals with their completion dates and unpaid balances. Won and backlog are different questions — one is bookings, one is money still in motion — and mixing them in a single number is how boards get surprised.

What good looks like: the forecast you give finance names its gate ("50%-plus probability, current-year splits only") so the number is reproducible by anyone who pulls the same view next week.

Scenario 3: Win/Loss Before The Renewal Push

Renewal season is coming. You want to know where ANC wins, where it loses, and which accounts are up next.

Open the win/loss view: every deal marked Won, Lost, or No Bid, with league attached. Cutting it by league answers the questions that shape bid strategy — where the win rate justifies aggressive bidding, where losses cluster, and which leagues supply the case studies for the next pursuit. This only works because the sales team closes the loop on every bid: a deal left open forever never becomes a data point, which is why stale Bid Status is a leadership problem, not just a hygiene nit.

For the renewal runway, use the renewals view — won deals approaching their contract completion dates in the next 90 days. Completion dates are enforced at the moment a deal is marked Won precisely so this view stays complete: if the date were optional, the renewal radar would have holes exactly where the biggest deals are.

Before any renewal conversation, open the account's Company record. The service tickets, event history, and past proposals are all attached — a renewal pitch that references the account's actual year lands very differently from a generic one.

Prove It Under Pressure

Keep Going

• Leadership: Dashboards — reading the rollups in depth.
• Leadership: Forecasting & Pipeline — the probability and split model.
• Leadership: Win/Loss — win-rate analysis by league and vertical.
• Leadership: Exporting & Asking the Assistant — turning any view into a shareable file.
• Core: Asking for Numbers — prompt patterns that return verifiable answers.