Stuck Deals Look Healthy Until You Check the Details
A deal marked proposal on the pipeline board looks the same whether the buyer is actively engaged or has stopped responding. Max Bevan, our principal account executive at Fast Slow Motion, looks past the stage name when a business shows him its pipeline, and he walked through what he checks with Eric Housh on a recent episode of The Fast Slow Motion Podcast. This post covers those checks, how to tell whether a team can speak to them, and what the CRM has to look like for the answers to show up without anyone digging. It sits alongside Why Your Sales Pipeline Isn’t Closing Deals, which covers the wider problem.
A Stage Name Is Where the Conversation Starts
Max begins from an assumption that the business already has its basics in place: a CRM, a sales process that has been built out, a Kanban board, and a team that captures deals accurately at the deal level, the product level, and across teams. Even with all of that, he said, a top-line stage like discovery or proposal doesn’t tell you much of the story until you dig into the details. The stage records where a deal sits in the process, and whether the deal is real depends on what sits underneath it.
The Details Worth Checking on Each Deal
What Has Happened and What Is Coming
The first group of details Max listed is about movement. He named activity and upcoming meetings as metrics that matter, along with the products the buyer is interested in and the context around the deal. Read together, they show whether the deal is being worked and whether a next step is on the calendar, and the product interest and surrounding context show what the buyer is actually evaluating. A deal at proposal with recent activity and a meeting booked reads very differently from a deal at the same stage with neither.
Why the Buyer Would Move Forward
The second group is about the buyer’s side of the deal. Max asked whether the team really knows the buyer’s business objectives and whether proper discovery has been done. He also asked whether anyone understands, at a high level, the timing or impact of the buyer moving forward, which speaks directly to the close date. His summary was that all of it matters for judging the validity of the deal. A close date with no discovery behind it and no clear impact for the buyer is closer to a guess, and the details are what turn it into something a leader can plan around.
Can the Rep Speak to Those Details Without Looking
Max’s next question is how accessible the details are. He asks whether reps really know what’s in their pipeline: ask one, off the cuff, what the pipeline looks like, what is closing this week, and what they’re working on, and see whether they have to open the CRM or whether the CRM reflects the story already in their head. The second version is the one to aim for, and we wrote about what it looks like in A Healthy Sales Pipeline Is One Reps Can Explain From Memory.
Max tied all of this to deal velocity, which he called the ultimate goal: the speed of the pipeline, how it’s connected, and how deals are progressing. On The Fast Slow Motion Podcast episode he said the way you tell that story depends on your sales process, your products, your procurement cycle, and how the CRM is structured to work for you. He didn’t put numbers on any of it, and the right point at which a deal counts as stuck will differ by business for the same reasons. Deal Velocity Matters More Than Deal Count goes further on measuring it.
Building the CRM So the Details Show Up
Max described two audiences for the same data. Sales leaders need to understand, at the individual level, what helps a deal progress and which stages it has to pass through, so the CRM has to be built out with that in mind. Executives and management need to know which KPIs the CRM produces to tell the story of actuals versus forecast. He put it as a combination of two things: a process, and a system that shows the data behind that process so you can tell whether the process is being followed. He added the question that makes the setup useful, which is whether people are actually looking at the data and having real conversations about it.
For a business whose pipeline only records stage names, that combination may take some rebuilding, and Fixing a Broken Sales Process Without Starting Over covers how to approach it without starting from zero.
Objective Details Keep Personality Out of the Forecast
Max said that as more people join a sales team, everyone’s numbers start to mean something different. His example was close dates: one rep tends to be optimistic about timing, while another is conservative enough that leadership can often move the forecast up a month, since that rep would rather pull a deal in early than push it back. Some personality will always be baked into the numbers, and Max’s view is that the data should tell the real story anyway, without hinging on any one person’s habits. The objective details of each deal are what show how much confidence the pipeline deserves.
Listen to the full podcast episode here.