The Pipeline Fixer
Things I notice · Note 01

Where do sales pipelines actually leak?

The answer, firstSales pipelines leak in five places, and almost never to a competitor: at Qualified, where nobody defined what qualified means; between Demo and Proposal, where deals move on how the call felt rather than on buyer evidence; at Proposal, where a sent proposal goes quiet and nothing notices; at Won, where nobody owns the handover after the yes; and at Retained, where the existing client book is never mined. Most businesses have two of the five.

Chanel Greeff · 23 August 2026 · 3 min read

Why “leak” and not “loss”

A lost deal has a reason attached: price, timing, a competitor. A leak has none. The deal didn’t lose; it stopped. Nobody moved it back, nobody closed it out, and by the time anyone noticed it had been quiet for six weeks. Leaks don’t appear in a loss report because nothing was ever marked lost. That’s why they cost more than losses: they’re invisible in exactly the place you’d look.

The five leaks

  1. No criteria (Qualified). Ask three salespeople what makes a lead qualified and get three answers, and the whole pipeline downstream is built on a guess. Symptom: a fat top of funnel and a forecast nobody believes. Case 01.
  2. Moves on feelings (Demo → Proposal). The call went well, so the deal moved. No budget confirmed, no decision-maker named, no next step dated. Symptom: proposal-stage deals that never close and never die. Case 02.
  3. Goes quiet (Proposal). Proposal sent, then silence, and nothing decides what happens next, so it depends on who remembers on a good week. Symptom: the median age of a proposal-stage deal is measured in weeks. Case 04.
  4. Nobody owns the handover (Won). The client said yes. Then sales, onboarding and delivery each re-explain them from scratch, and a stall sits there until the client phones. Symptom: you can see revenue in the pipeline and not on month-end. Case 03.
  5. Forgot the cheapest revenue (Retained). The pipeline ends at “won”. No review trigger, no referral ask, no cross-sell. Symptom: all growth comes from new logos and lead-gen spend keeps climbing. Case 01.

How to find yours

Pull every deal from the last ninety days and sort by stage, then by days in stage. The stage with the oldest median is your leak, and the second-oldest is your second. If you don’t have ninety days of stage history because deals only ever moved forward and nobody recorded when, that itself is the answer: it’s leak two.

Or take the Leak Cost Check, which asks ten questions about how deals actually behave, points at which of the five is yours, or at the way in before them, and puts a figure on it from four numbers you already know. The business case follows by email, usually within a day.

Recognise this one? Let’s look at yours.

No charge. Tell me how deals move through your business and I’ll tell you where I think they stop.

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