For the past three weeks I’ve been taking apart why pipeline stalls. Buying groups that keep expanding. Intent signals that stop meaning anything useful. Nurture programs so automated they’ve forgotten there’s a person on the other end.
Naming problems is the easy part. So this week, I’m going to start talking about what you can do about it.
Here’s where I’d start though, because it’s the step most teams skip. When pipeline slows, the first question isn’t which campaign to run. It’s what’s actually broken. Prescribing before diagnosing is how you end up spending another quarter’s budget on volume you didn’t need.
Once you’ve done that, four moves consistently show up in teams that manage the middle of the funnel well.
Decide what “moving” means, then hold the line on it
Most teams track stage. Stage tells you almost nothing, because a deal can sit in stage three for a hundred days and still be in stage three.
Better teams define movement as a behavior. A scheduled next steps with a named person and a purpose. A new stakeholder joining the conversation. A commercial discussion actually starting. Then they flag anything that hasn’t cleared that bar in a set window.
This isn’t complicated. It’s just uncomfortable, because it requires agreeing on a definition and then enforcing it in the CRM when people would rather not look. Most teams have never done that work, which is exactly why it’s worth doing.
Give the champion the words
Deals stall because the person who likes you can’t yet explain why anyone else in their company should care.
They’re bought in. They just don’t have the internal narrative to take it up the chain, and nobody is going to hand it to them. So they wait until they have time to build it themselves, and that time never arrives.
Marketing can fix this, and it costs very little. Not a product one-pager though. A practical template for making the internal case: what the problem is costing today, what the outcome looks like, and what happens if nothing changes. Write it the way your champion would have to say it in a room where you aren’t present.
The thing that makes this work is specificity. You cannot manufacture urgency on a $200K deal with a deadline you’ve invented. You can create it by connecting a specific problem to a specific outcome on a specific timeline, which is the version of “why now” that actually services contact with a CFO.
Read the account, not the contact
If one person at an account is engaged and nobody else is, that tells you something important. It means your champion hasn’t mobilized internally yet, and the deal is more fragile than the activity suggests.
If the economic buyer starts showing up, that’s real. Something changed inside that organization.
You don’t need sophisticated technology to see this. You need a shared agreement about which signals count at the account level and the discipline to look at engagement that way instead of contact by contact. Most teams already have the data, they’re just reading it one row at a time.
Be honest about stuck pipeline
This is the hardest one, and it has nothing to do with process.
Nobody wants to disqualify a deal that looks qualified. It’s in the forecast. Somebody’s still replying to emails. Pulling it out feels like admitting failure, so it sits there, occupying attention and inflating a number everyone quietly knows is soft.
The teams that handle the messy middle best surface stuck deals early and have a plan for what to do with them. That requires leadership that treats honesty about deal health as discipline rather than bad news. If your team is rewarded for the size of the pipeline instead of the movement in it, you’ll get exactly what you’re paying for.
Where this leaves you
None of these four moves require new headcount or new software. They require agreeing on definitions, writing better mid-funnel content, and telling the truth in pipeline reviews. It’s that simple.
The full framework, including the diagnostic questions to ask before you decide anything, is in The Messy Middle guide. An easy read if this is something you want to further explore and advance.
And one last thought. Everything on this list is something a team can start doing on a Monday without asking permission from anyone. Which means if pipeline is still stalling six months from now, the constraint was never the budget.