Sales CRM
Check your deal pipelines against your design so leads have somewhere to land and move forward.
This step checks the sales side of your CRM against your pipeline design, including your deal stages, exit criteria, deal properties, automation and pipeline reporting. It makes sure leads have a clear place to land and a clear path forward once they're ready to talk to sales.
Most sales pipelines drift over time. Stages get added for one-off situations, deals sit untouched for months, required fields get skipped and the forecast stops matching what actually closes. When that happens, salespeople stop trusting the CRM and go back to spreadsheets and memory.
The design step decides how your pipeline should work, and this step finds the gaps between that design and what's actually in your CRM. Fixing those gaps gives you a pipeline you can forecast from and reports that show where deals get stuck.
Signs you need this
- Deals pile up in one stage
- Forecasts don't match what actually closes
- Nobody agrees on what qualified means
- Deals have no amount, close date or owner
- You added a new offer, pipeline or salesperson
End results
- A snapshot of your pipeline by stage and deal age
- Stages and exit criteria that match how you actually sell
- Cleaned up deal properties with the right fields required
- A pipeline report you can actually forecast from
Common questions
What are exit criteria?
Exit criteria are what has to be true for a deal to move to the next stage, like a discovery call being completed or a proposal being accepted. Most teams skip them, which is a big reason deals stall and forecasts drift.
How many pipeline stages should we have?
Usually five to seven, covering the real decision points in your sales process. If a stage doesn't change what the salesperson does next, it probably doesn't need to exist.
What deal properties should be required?
At a minimum, require an amount, a close date, an owner and a deal type or offer. Those four fields power most pipeline reports, so leaving any of them blank makes forecasting much harder.
How do we handle retainers and recurring revenue?
A retainer isn't a deal that closes once, so recurring revenue usually gets its own pipeline or deal type. That keeps your new business numbers from getting mixed up with renewals and ongoing work.
How do we know when a deal has stalled?
Set an expected length of time for each stage based on your past deals, and flag anything that sits longer than that. A simple report of open deals with no activity in the last 30 days is a good place to start.
