ATV WORKSHOP - Why Your Sales Forecast May Be Lying to You (& How to Fix It)

Based on the book Choice: What Business Owners and Startup Founders Get Wrong About Growth by Mike Gomez

Strategic Purpose

This workshop is designed to address one of the most persistent and costly problems facing early-revenue startups: false confidence in sales pipelines.

The session does three things simultaneously:

• Exposes how little founders actually know about how buying decisions are being made
• Demonstrates that this ignorance is systemic, not personal or talent-based
• Reframes sales as a trainable, methodological discipline, not a personality-driven
• activity

If founders leave this session comfortable with their pipeline confidence, the workshop has failed. The intended outcome is reality check, not reassurance.

Intended Audience

This workshop is designed specifically for revenue-stage but operationally chaotic founders, including those who:

• Have real revenue and active sales pipelines
• Believe they are “pretty good” at selling
• Still miss forecasts and revenue targets
• Regularly feel surprised by lost deals
• Cannot clearly explain why deals stall or die

This is not a beginner workshop. It is a deprogramming workshop for founders who are past theory and feeling the cost of improvisation.

CORE PROMISE

Participants will leave with:

1. A fundamentally different understanding of why most sales are actually lost — and why it is not what founders typically believe (Pillar One: “I Didn’t Know”)
2. A clear understanding that their current sales struggles are the predictable result of defining sales as “convincing” rather than serving a buyer’s decision process (Pillar Two: Convince vs. Serve)
3. A precise, non-emotional way to distinguish between “confidence” and “knowledge” in their pipeline using two independent dimensions: Probability of Go and Probability of Win (Pillar Three: PGo / PWin)
4. Direct, first-hand evidence of how much they do and do not know about the deals they currently feel best about (Pillar Four: Deal Reality Check)
5. A reframed view of sales as a trainable, decision-serving discipline whose primary function is to reduce unknowns early, not to persuade late (Synthesis)

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