This allows you visibility of resourcing problems on the horizon, which in turn should allow you to concentrate your sales efforts, stretch or compress existing work, and flexibly use your associates.

A forecast of monthly income can be achieved by discounting the predicted deal size by the chances of that deal happening. This is your Discounted Sales Pipeline (DSP). The download here will let you calculate your DSP against your sales targets – although it is better to use PSA or CRM software specifically for this.
As your practice grows and you gather more data on the likelihood of success of different services, your model can be tweaked to be more precise and capture more subtle metrics. One useful metric here is what Equiteq calls the ‘pipeline index’ which is created by the following ratio:

If the index is at 1, the two are perfectly matched. If the index is more than one your resources will be stretched.
Good pipeline management is not simply forecasting – in fact, I would recommend separating management and forecasting. If your discussions focus on close dates, probabilities, and deal sizes, then you are forecasting. Management means ensuring that the pipeline process is working productively and that all opportunities are being met by a strongly motivated workforce. It is also ensuring that staff understand the sales priorities (see below) and that the right discussions and proposals are happening (for example project utilisation and leverage is creating sufficient margins. Weekly sales meetings are crucial to prioritising pipeline work. At strategic reviews, the sales meetings should offer insights as to whether different people need to be recruited at different grades, whether the incentivisation scheme is working.

The second point concerns mapping and understanding the client journey through the pipeline. It’s important that the client experience through the pipeline is as good, if not better, than their experience working with you. It would be a useful exercise to map out typical pipeline routes and touch points using a sales pipeline tracker, to see how your firm can add value to each client as the progress and follow up with those who fall-out.