Run rate

The revenue a period would produce if the current pace continued: the trailing period's revenue, or the average of recent periods, projected forward. The baseline a forecast bridge starts from.

DefinitionThe revenue a period would produce if the current pace continued: the trailing period's revenue, or the average of recent periods, projected forward. The baseline a forecast bridge starts from.

Why it matters

A forecast above run rate is a claim that something will change. The bridge names the deals that make the claim true, and the slip count says how often those deals have failed to close before.

How it is computed

Revenue over a trailing window scaled to a full period, adjusted by the seasonal index where the business is seasonal.

Example

Year to date through August is $7.5 million. Scaled by eight twelfths it gives $11.25 million. Those months normally carry 62.6 percent of the year, which gives $11.98 million.

Where it goes wrong

A straight-line scaling in a seasonal business, which understates every year whose strong months are still to come.

Articles that use this term

Coverage and territory · Sales teams

A new rep's first ninety days, from the data: the list that replaces shadowing

What a newly hired rep should be given on day one from the book they inherit: the accounts ranked by revenue with days since last touch, the returning lines that were bought and dropped, the dormant accounts with their cadence and run rate, the open deals with slip counts, and the tier cadence that says who to call first. A ninety-day plan in three lists, the measures that say whether the ramp is on track, and why it beats a week of shadowing.

16 Sept 20263 min read AI and self-service analytics

A weekly sales digest worth reading: what a good one looks like, line by line

An annotated example of a weekly sales digest built from computed tables: the header that states the period and the checks, ten movements each with the measure, the level, the change, the threshold and the citation, the three lists that follow, untouched, slipped and dormant, the line that says what did not move, and the footer with the definition version. What each element is for, and the version of the same digest that nobody reads.

16 Sept 20263 min read AI and self-service analytics

Account health score: why a computed score beats a colour-coded one

What is wrong with the red-amber-green account health field most CRMs carry, what a computed health score is made of, five inputs from the ledger and the CRM with stated weights, how the weights are set from the company's own churn history rather than opinion, why the score is shown with its inputs and never alone, the identity that every account has one score from the same rule, and how the score is validated against what happened.

16 Sept 20263 min read Forecast and pipeline

B2B churn without a subscription: measuring lost customers from the ledger

How a company that sells on orders rather than subscriptions measures churn from its ledger: the definition of a lost customer from its own order cadence, churned revenue as the run rate before the silence, the churn rate by segment and by rep, the identity that ties churned plus retained plus new to the two periods' revenue, and why a fixed 12-month rule counts the wrong customers as lost.

16 Sept 20262 min read Data quality and reconciliation · Construction and building materials

Credit limit headroom: the accounts that stopped buying because they hit the limit

How a builders' merchant or trade supplier finds the accounts whose purchasing is constrained by their credit limit rather than by demand: headroom from the credit file and the ledger, orders held or refused for credit, the accounts at the limit whose purchase pattern flattened, and the two decisions that follow, a limit review for the good payers and a collections conversation for the rest.

16 Sept 20262 min read Coverage and territory

Dormancy by industry: order cadence from weekly to annual, and the threshold that follows

A dormant account is one silent beyond a multiple of its own cadence, and the cadence runs from twice a week to once a year depending on the desk. This hub sets out, for twelve industries, the typical cadence, what silence looks like in that industry's data, the threshold that follows, the run rate that values the account, and the seasonal trap in each, with the full guide for each desk.

16 Sept 20263 min read