Pushed Deal

When the close date keeps moving

A pushed deal is one whose expected close date moves to a later period, and a high push rate is a leading indicator of forecast misses. A single push is often legitimate: buyer timelines genuinely change. But a deal pushed repeatedly, its close date sliding quarter after quarter, is rarely a series of coincidences. It usually means the deal was never as close as its date implied, and the pushes are the visible symptom of optimism or a lack of real progression.

Push versus slip

Pushes and slippage are closely related views of the same problem:

- A push is the act of moving a deal's close date to a future period. - Slippage is the broader phenomenon of deals not closing when expected. - The push rate quantifies how often deals get moved out.

A repeatedly pushed deal is a slipping deal, and tracking the push rate turns a series of individual date changes into a measurable signal about pipeline health.

Why it predicts misses

A high push rate is one of the more reliable early warnings that a forecast will come in short, because pushed deals often do not merely move, they eventually die. A deal that keeps sliding is frequently a deal the buyer is quietly disengaging from, using date changes rather than a clear no. This is why the pattern matters more than any single push: a deal pushed once may close next period, but a deal pushed three times is telling you the original commitment was never real. The fix is upstream, in dating deals to the buyer's actual process through a real close plan rather than to quarter-end hope, so that close dates mean something and pushes become rare and genuine rather than a routine way of hiding stalled deals. A team that watches its push rate catches deteriorating deals early, which is exactly what keeps forecast accuracy from being ambushed by a cluster of deals that were sliding in plain sight.