How do you audit a sales pipeline?

Q: How do you audit a sales pipeline?

Pull every deal from the last ninety days into one sheet with its stage history. Sort each stage by days in stage and find the one with the oldest median: that’s your leak. Read those deals one by one, not in aggregate, and write down what was supposed to happen next and who owned it. A pipeline audit is reading, not reporting. An afternoon is enough to find the stage; a week is enough to prove it.

Before you start: what you’re looking for

Not “how is the pipeline doing?” That question produces a dashboard. You’re looking for the one stage where deals stop moving and nobody notices, and the reason they stop. Everything below is in service of that.

The sequence

Export ninety days of deals with stage history. Every deal created, moved or closed in the last ninety days, with the date it entered each stage. If your CRM can’t give you stage-entry dates, note that; it’s finding one.
Days in stage, per stage, median not average. One ancient deal skews an average; the median tells you what normal looks like. The stage with the oldest median is where to read.
Read the stuck deals. Open the ten oldest in that stage. For each: what was the last touch, who owned the next one, was there a date, did it pass? Write the answers in a column. Patterns appear by deal five.
Check the stage definitions against reality. Pick five deals at random in each stage and ask whether they meet the entry criteria, if there are any. If “qualified” deals have no budget confirmed, the stage is mislabelled and the conversion numbers below it are fiction.
Count the owners. How many open deals have no next-step owner, or an owner who has left? That number is usually the headline.
Look at what moved backwards. If the answer is nothing, ever, deals can’t move back in your process, and the pipeline is carrying every deal that used to be real.
Find the post-yes handover. For deals marked won, how long until delivery started? If that’s weeks, the leak is after the sale, and it’s the most expensive kind.
Write one page. The stage, the number, the three things you’d change. If it needs more than a page you haven’t found it yet.

What a finding looks like

Stage 3 is the leak: 11 of 14 stalled deals sat in “proposal sent” with no owner and no next-step date. Median time in stage: 41 days. Nothing in the system notices a deal going quiet until the client does.

That’s a line from a real write-up (names changed). Notice it has a stage, a count, a duration, and a cause. That’s the whole output of an audit.

The five numbers to leave behind

Stage conversion, days in stage, deals gone quiet 14+ days, forecast versus closed, proposal follow-up rate. If the audit ends with those five on one screen the business can read every Monday, the next audit is unnecessary. Building that screen is Build my dashboard; the audit above, done for you in seven days, is Find the leak.