Sales forecasts have a bad habit of being wildly optimistic. If you’ve ever been burned by a “sure thing” deal that fell apart last minute, you know the pain. This guide is for sales leaders and reps who want to get real about their pipeline—and aren’t interested in shiny dashboards that just tell you what you want to hear.
Recapped (recapped.html) is a sales collaboration tool with analytics built in. But here’s the thing: analytics are only useful if they help you see what’s actually going on, not just what looks good in a report. This article will walk you through how to use Recapped’s analytics to dig into your deals, cut through the noise, and actually improve your sales forecasting accuracy.
Step 1: Understand What Recapped Analytics Tracks (and What It Doesn’t)
Before you start fiddling with filters, know what data you’re actually looking at. Recapped analytics focus on activities inside your mutual action plans, buyer engagement, and deal milestones—not just CRM field changes.
What you’ll see in Recapped: - Buyer engagement: Who’s opening your plans, viewing documents, and responding to tasks. - Deal progress: Key milestones hit (or missed), like signed NDAs, completed security reviews, or executive signoffs. - Internal actions: Rep follow-ups, overdue tasks, and bottlenecks flagged by the system.
What you won’t get from Recapped: - Fantasy pipeline numbers that come from wishful thinking. - Vague “deal health” scores based on gut feelings. - One-click predictions that ignore buyer behavior.
Pro Tip: If you’re just looking for a pretty bar chart to show your boss, Recapped isn’t for you. The data here is all about what buyers are actually doing—not what sales hopes will happen.
Step 2: Get Your Mutual Action Plans Set Up (or Your Data Will Be Garbage)
Recapped’s analytics are only as good as your mutual action plans. If you’re not mapping out clear steps with your buyers, the platform can’t track real progress.
How to do this right: - Set up a mutual action plan for every real deal—don’t leave it to chance or “we’ll figure it out.” - Break the plan into specific, buyer-facing steps (e.g., “Legal review scheduled,” “IT signed off,” “PO sent”), not just sales tasks. - Make sure your buyers are actually invited and participating in the plan—lurkers don’t count.
What doesn’t work: - Generic templates slapped onto every deal. - Plans that live in email threads instead of Recapped. - Skipping this step and hoping Recapped will “figure it out.”
Pro Tip: Garbage in, garbage out. If your team isn’t disciplined about using mutual action plans, your analytics will just reflect chaos.
Step 3: Spot Real Buying Signals (and Ignore the Fluff)
Here’s where Recapped analytics actually help you forecast: it shows you what buyers are doing, not just what reps are logging.
In Recapped, look for: - Consistent buyer activity: Are they opening documents, assigning tasks, and moving steps forward? - Multiple stakeholders involved: Does your plan have participation from decision makers, not just a single champion? - Completed milestones: Not just “scheduled demos,” but signed agreements, completed security reviews, and finalized contracts.
Red flags to watch out for: - Ghost town: Plan invited, but no activity from the buyer side. - Single-threaded: Only your champion interacts, execs are missing. - Stalled steps: Steps sitting overdue for days or weeks.
What doesn’t matter nearly as much as people pretend: - How many emails your rep has sent. - Whether your CRM says a deal is in “proposal” stage. - Vague “next steps” that aren’t written down or acknowledged by the buyer.
Step 4: Use Analytics Filters to Separate Hype from Reality
Recapped lets you slice and dice data by deal stage, buyer activity, overdue steps, and more. Don’t just stare at the default dashboard—use the filters to get the real story.
How to use filters to your advantage: - Filter by “stalled deals”: See which deals have overdue steps or no recent buyer activity. - Look at “multi-threaded” deals: Focus on deals where multiple stakeholders are actively engaged. - Drill into closed-won vs. closed-lost: Compare what real engagement looked like in deals you won versus those you lost.
What to ignore: - Vanity metrics like “number of steps created”—what matters is whether buyers are moving through them. - Deals with lots of internal activity but zero buyer-side engagement.
Pro Tip: If you’re forecasting based on activity your team is logging, you’re just guessing. Focus on buyer-side actions.
Step 5: Build Your Forecast from the Bottom Up (Not Top Down)
Most sales forecasts start with the biggest deals and work backwards, then fudge the numbers to hit a target. That’s how you end up missing quotas.
Instead, use Recapped analytics to build your forecast based on real progress in each deal.
Here’s how: - For each deal, look at mutual action plan completion rate and buyer engagement. - Give more weight to deals where buyers are consistently working steps and milestones are being hit. - Discount (or ignore) deals with no recent buyer activity, single-threaded engagement, or overdue critical steps. - Roll up your forecast based on what’s actually moving, not what’s “expected” to close.
What works: - Being brutally honest about deal risk, even if it hurts your numbers now. - Using Recapped’s completion rates and engagement scores as your primary forecasting indicators.
What doesn’t: - Including every deal in the pipeline “just in case.” - Letting reps talk you into keeping zombie deals on the board.
Pro Tip: If you’re under pressure to show a big number, remember: reality always wins in the end. Better to have a smaller, accurate forecast than a huge, laughably wrong one.
Step 6: Share Analytics with Your Team (But Don’t Weaponize Them)
Transparency is good—public shaming is not. Use Recapped analytics to have real conversations with your team about what’s working and what’s not.
How to make analytics useful in team reviews: - Review mutual action plans in pipeline meetings, not just deal amounts. - Ask reps to walk through buyer engagement data, not just give “gut feel” updates. - Celebrate reps who build multi-threaded, engaged deals—not just those with big numbers.
What to avoid: - Turning analytics into a stick to beat people with. - Over-indexing on one metric (like “steps completed”) instead of looking at the full picture.
Pro Tip: The goal is to make the forecast more accurate, not to catch people out. Use the data to coach, not punish.
Step 7: Iterate and Keep It Simple
Don’t fall for the trap of over-engineering your forecasting process. Recapped analytics are powerful, but only if you actually use them to make decisions—and update your plans as you learn.
How to keep improving: - Regularly review which analytics actually predict deal success, and which are just noise. - Simplify your mutual action plans: shorter, clearer steps drive more engagement. - Adjust your forecasting rules as your team (and buyers) change.
What to ignore: - The urge to build a “perfect” dashboard. - Fancy AI predictions that don’t show their work.
Getting your sales forecast right isn’t about finding the fanciest tool or the cleverest metric. It’s about tracking what buyers actually do, not what you hope they’ll do. Recapped’s analytics can help you see the truth in your pipeline, but only if you set up clear mutual action plans and focus on real engagement. Start simple, be honest, and tweak as you go. The more you keep things grounded, the better your forecast will get.