Not a planning tool. Not a capacity model. Not another spreadsheet that survives exactly until the SKO ends.
A structured interrogation framework. 38 questions that expose the assumptions baked into every quota, force the bottom-up and top-down numbers to face each other, and turn SKO theatre into a number your team can actually defend.
In 2022, a VP of Revenue walked out of a quota-setting meeting having just been handed a number with no explanation.
He'd asked three times where it came from.
The answer was always some variation of "the model says so."
He went back to his desk. He pulled every quota from the last four years. He compared them to the actual construction logic.
There wasn't any.
The numbers were made up in a hotel room the night before the SKO and retrofitted to a spreadsheet.
He wrote down every question he wished someone had asked in that room.
Then he sent a copy to the Professor.
He will never set a number without evidence again.
He will never build a quota on optimism.
If you want the method, the framework is the only way.
Everything else is gone.
The tools you already have told you the quota was achievable. Then Q1 started and the org couldn't carry it. The problem was never the tools.
It was the assumptions nobody challenged before the number went live.
A 38-question interrogation framework across four sections. Each question carries its mechanism, what the answer reveals, and the red flags that mean the quota was built on fiction.
Dispatched to practitioners. These are their reports.
We ran the Assumption Exposure section on our Q3 number and found the win rate assumption was based on data from three years ago. Win rates had dropped 22 points since then. The quota was £800k over what the org could realistically carry.
My CFO handed me a bottom-up quota with 14 assumptions buried in the model. I used Section 2 to work through each one in a 90-minute session. Seven of them were wrong. Two were directionally right but unsupported. We rebuilt the number. It was 18% lower. We hit it.
The SKO Sanity Protocol is the thing I needed four SKOs ago. Every year we announced a number that felt like a stretch goal dressed up as a plan. This framework forces the questions nobody wants to ask in the room — because once you're in the room, the politics have already won. I used it for the first time in November. We walked into January with a number we could actually defend. My team trusted it. That had never happened before.
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Every quota looks defensible until someone asks where the number came from.— Professor Pipeline
He will never set a number without evidence again.
He will never build a quota on optimism.
The framework is the only way to get his method.
Everything else is gone.