A Healthy Sales Pipeline Is One Reps Can Explain From Memory
Max Bevan has a question he uses to check a pipeline: ask a rep what’s in it and listen to how they answer. Max, our principal account executive at Fast Slow Motion, described the test on a recent episode of The Fast Slow Motion Podcast with Eric Housh. This post covers the test itself, what has to be in place before it means anything, and what leadership adds to it. It’s part of a group of posts that start with Why Your Sales Pipeline Isn’t Closing Deals.
The Test
Max asked how accessible the details of each deal are and whether reps really know what’s in their pipeline. His version of the test is to ask a rep, off the cuff, what their pipeline looks like, what they’re going to close this week, and what they’re working on. The rep either has to look at the CRM to answer, or is truly dialed in and the CRM reflects the story that’s also in their head.
What Has to Be True First
Max starts from an assumption that the business already has the basics in place: a CRM, a sales process that has been built out, a Kanban board, and a team capturing deals accurately at the deal level, the product level, and across teams. The reps also need to know where each deal stands, which means knowing what’s in front of them and what needs attention. Only after that does he move to the details of each deal, such as activity, upcoming meetings, product interest, and business objectives, and Stuck Deals Look Healthy Until You Check the Details covers those.
What a Healthy Answer Sounds Like
Max described the version he wants to hear: reps who know their pipeline, know what’s closing this week, and know what they’re working on, with a CRM that matches what they already carry in their head. Max didn’t define a healthy pipeline in those exact words, and the title of this post reflects how his test reads. What he described was a match between what the rep knows and what the system shows.
What the CRM Has to Provide
The test points at the CRM as much as it points at the rep. Max said the CRM has to be built out so sales leaders understand, at the individual level, what helps a deal progress and which stages it has to pass through, and so executives can see the KPIs that tell the story of actuals versus forecast. He put it as a combination of a process and a system that shows the data behind the process, so leaders can tell whether the process is being followed. He also asked whether people are actually looking at that data and having real conversations about it, and Deal Velocity Matters More Than Deal Count covers the metrics behind that.
What Leadership Adds
The conversation described a pattern where leadership rolls out a CRM and never changes its own behavior, so leaders keep pinging people on Slack for deal updates instead of holding the team accountable for keeping the CRM current as the source of truth. Eric asked listeners to picture micromanagement going away because the data is trustworthy, with executives no longer knocking on doors because the tooling already gives them visibility. Max also described a day-to-day version of that for reps: logging into HubSpot, checking a dashboard, reviewing the pipeline, and working from a sales workspace that shows where to spend their time.
Six months in, Max said, everyone is looking at the same scoreboard and the same dashboard, each role with its own morning routine based on the KPIs that matter to it. What Changes Six Months After Your CRM Finally Works covers what that looks like across departments.
Listen to the full podcast episode here.