Setting commit / likely / best is the most consequential five minutes of your week. The point of three bands is that one number forces you to average optimism and reality together — and the average always sounds nicer than the truth.
How to think about each band
- Commit — what you’ll back. If you’d be embarrassed to miss it, that’s your commit. Discipline yourself to leave deals you don’t actually believe in out of this number.
- Likely — your honest expected outcome. If you ran this quarter ten times, this is roughly where you’d land.
- Best — the ceiling, not the moonshot. Achievable if every loose end ties up.
What null means
Leaving a band blank is a signal — usually “I haven’t decided what this deal is worth yet.” The forecast page surfaces unforecasted rows separately so you can’t accidentally hide them in a sum.
The three-equal warning
Setting all three bands to the same number is allowed but the UI flags it. The cases where it’s honest are narrow — usually a contract is signed and the amount is final, or the deal is dead. Otherwise the three-equal pattern means you skipped the thinking.