Every board deck has a pipeline number. Very few of those numbers have been tested by someone who has to close them.
In July I stepped into a sales consulting role at a portfolio company and inherited the pipeline from a departed rep: 22 open deals worth $1.56M, against a $1.2M new-ARR target. On paper, that was 1.3x coverage before a single new deal had been sourced.
Ten weeks later, $455K of that pipeline sits in late stage. That is about 29 cents on the dollar. Twelve inherited deals are closed lost, and none have closed won yet.
That isn’t a sales story..it’s a diligence story. The pipeline was never $1.56M. It only looked like it from the outside.
Where the air came out
The pipeline looked stronger than it actually was, largely because of how it was structured. A standard CRM export wouldn’t have revealed the underlying issues. Four patterns accounted for most of the problem.
- Double counting. On nine accounts, the pilot and its future conversion sat in the pipeline as two separate open deals. The conversion deals alone added about $950K. Not one survived as written. Most were deleted from the CRM outright, so they don’t even appear in the baseline above.
- Deals sized to hope. Four deals were listed at a combined $585K. Once they were scoped against what each buyer would actually fund, they came to $120K. One went from $180K to $25K.
- Zombies. A $150K deal was listed in Negotiation & Contract at handoff. The CRM had marked it closed lost four months earlier. The last contact with the buyer was nearly six months before the handoff.
- “No red flags.” One deal was noted as “contract sent, awaiting signature, no red flags.” It closed lost to no decision within a week.
Anyone relying on the CRM during due diligence would have missed these same issues.
The fix? Start by re-qualify before you forecast a dollar
We started by reassessing every deal in the pipeline rather than assuming it was qualified. Each deal had to meet four criteria:
Does the deal have a pulse? We start here because it’s the fastest cut. Several inherited deals had zero communication for months. When we reached out, nobody answered. A $150K deal sitting in Negotiation & Contract hadn’t heard from the buyer since February. If the buyer isn’t talking to you, you don’t have a deal..you have a contact record.
Is the champion the economic buyer? This was the most common failure by far. A product lead who “wants to use it” but has no budget authority. A fractional CMO with a referral incentive, while the CEO’s position was “Meta spend is working, why spend on something new.” A loyalty lead who told us himself that he wasn’t the decision maker. A champion without budget is a coach. And while coaches are valuable, they aren’t pipeline.
Is there a written next step that the buyer owns? On one account, we had been emailing into the abyss for over a month. If the only person moving the deal forward is the seller, the deal isn’t moving.
Can the buyer explain what they’re buying? The hottest deal in the handover was marked “contract sent, imminent close.” Nothing was out for signature. On the call, the buyer said he felt like he was being pushed into something. We killed the deal and kept the relationship. That account is now being repositioned without the pilot.
We also changed the plumbing. A booked meeting now lands in a non-forecasted qualification stage. When the meeting is held, the deal either moves to discovery or gets closed/lost. Stage zero is not pipeline.
Then rebuild the process around how the customer buys
Cleaning the pipeline only tells you what’s real. It doesn’t tell you how to move it. The deeper problem was the process. It was built around what we wanted to sell, not around how a buyer gets a decision through their own organization.
In Q2, only 25% of intro calls became opportunities. Prospects were interested, but they had no way to picture the outcome or carry it to the person who controls the budget. So we rebuilt every step after the intro call to produce something the buyer owns.
- Use case mapping workshop. The next step after an intro call is now a working session, not a demo. We help the prospect lay out what they’re trying to accomplish and map it to the platform.
- Recommendation with options. We anchor on activating their highest-impact use cases against the business outcome they care about most. They choose from a short set of options rather than reacting to one proposal.
- Business case. The use case map and the recommendation get tied to tangible business levers, with ROI modeled from our benchmark data.
- Business brief. That becomes a brief the champion can sell through their organization. It translates directly into the order form.
The result showed up in one quarter. In Q3, intro-to-opportunity conversion rose from 25% to 65%, and the team created 11 new opportunities, the most of any quarter this year.
The shift is from selling to the champion to equipping the champion. Each step closes the same gap that killed the inherited deals.
What it looks like when it works
One global athletic brand came over as a $70K opportunity. Their product lead had declined a free pilot…twice. An older, $150K opportunity had gone stale, and the handover rated internal urgency as “low.” By any CRM read, it was a deal to close out.
Instead, we followed the new energy: a Direct to Consumer (DTC) analytics lead at a major athletic wear brand who cared about a different problem. We reframed the conversation from wear testing to loyalty and re-ran discovery across six calls from mid-August to late September. Then we built the ROI model together.
Here’s my personal cheat code: A true champion is someone you can text at any time for the inside baseball on the deal. Who’s really deciding? What does the CFO think? Where is the budget actually coming from? In my experience, deals with that kind of champion close at over 98% of the time. This deal came alive the moment the analytics lead became that person.
As I write this, it’s a 6-figure deal at the business case stage. The business owner brought their own segment data, proposed the target base and opt-in assumption themselves, and committed to take the number to leadership and close before year end.
That’s the signal to look for. When the buyer starts bringing their own data to the business case, they own it.
What most pipeline diligence misses
On paper, this pipeline showed 1.3x coverage of the target. Once it was re-qualified, late-stage coverage was 0.38x. Both numbers came from the same deals. The only difference was whether someone had re-run discovery on them.
Most diligence stops at the export: stage, amount, close date, coverage ratio. Those are the rep’s inputs, not the buyer’s commitments. Here are the questions we ask instead:
- How many open deals are conversions of pilots that are also counted?
- What share of late-stage value has a named economic buyer on record?
- When was the last two-way contact on every deal over $50K?
- What is the next step on each deal, and does the buyer own it?
- How much of late stage is expansion versus net-new logos? (Here, 3 of the 5 late-stage deals were expansion. That’s healthy revenue, but it says something different about product-market pull.)
- What does the process ask the buyer to do between the first call and the order form?
This is where an operator-immersive model earns its keep. At In Revenue Capital, we don’t just read the pipeline in diligence. We pressure-test it the way an operator would on day one in the seat. The same lens that spots an inflated pipeline before the check clears is the one we deploy after it: re-qualify, rebuild the process around the buyer, and put real pipeline behind the plan. See it in diligence. Diagnose it. Deploy against it.
