I sat on a forecast call a while back where a deal came up for the fourth week running. Same stage. Same close date, pushed twice. Same commentary from the rep, almost word for word. Still working it. Good conversation last week. Champion is engaged.
Nobody in that room could have told you whether the deal had moved an inch since July. Including the rep. Including me.
The uncomfortable part is that all the systems were working exactly as designed. Stage was populated. Activity was logged. Engagement scoring was green. Every field we had agreed to measure was full, and none of them told us the one thing we needed to know.
Stage is a label, not a measurement
A deal sits in stage three because somebody decided it belonged in stage three. That decision might have been made in June by a rep who has since changed their mind twice and never updated the record.
Activity counts have the same problem in a different outfit. Seven touches last month proves that seven touches happened. It says nothing about whether anything changed on the other side of them.
So we end up with a pipeline view that is very precise about state and almost silent about movement. Then we’re surprised when the forecast misses, and the response is usually to add more fields.
What actually moves
I’ve been writing all month about the handful of people who decide your deal, most of whom you will never see. If you take that seriously, it changes what progress looks like.
A deal is moving when the number of distinct people from that account in the conversation goes up. When a second function shows up, and it’s a function that wasn’t invited by your champion out of politeness. When somebody from finance or ops or security asks a question that only makes sense if they’ve already started planning for this to be real.
A deal is moving when your champion asks you for something internal-facing. A one page summary. Numbers they can defend. An answer to a question their CFO asked. Nobody requests that material unless they are building a case inside the building.
And a deal is moving when the shape of the timeline question changes. “When could you have this live” is a different question from “what would it take to have this live by January.” The second one means somebody has a date in their head.
None of those are fields in your CRM. That’s the whole problem.
The reason we don’t measure them
They’re hard, and they don’t roll up.
You can’t put “a second function appeared in the thread” on a dashboard without somebody having to notice it and write it down. It requires a rep to think about the account rather than update the account. It produces a number that finance cannot audit and marketing cannot attribute.
So it loses. Every quarter, in every prioritization conversation, the messy signal that would actually tell you something loses to the clean signal that tells you nothing.
I’ve watched teams spend real money instrumenting engagement scoring down to the second, while the question of whether anyone new from the account has entered the conversation in six weeks goes unasked because there’s no place to put the answer.
What better teams do about it
The teams I’ve seen get this right did not solve it with technology. They picked two or three progression signals, defined them plainly, and made them part of the deal review.
How many distinct people from this account have we heard from in the last 30 days, and is that number higher or lower than the month before?
Has anyone outside our champion’s function entered the conversation, and what did they ask?
Has our champion asked us for anything they would only need if they were making the case internally?
Three questions, asked out loud, in every deal review. No new platform. No new field. The value is not in the data, it’s in the fact that somebody now has to answer.
What happens next is predictable and still surprising every time. Reps start noticing the things they’re going to be asked about. Deals that looked healthy get reclassified honestly, because “still working it” stops being an acceptable answer. The forecast gets worse for a quarter and then gets considerably better.
The part I’d push back on
This isn’t a substitute for pipeline metrics, and I’m not suggesting you throw out the reporting you have. Stage and velocity and coverage all still matter, especially to the people who have to plan a business around them.
But those numbers describe what your pipeline looks like. They don’t describe what it’s doing. And if the only instrument you’ve got is the one that describes what it looks like, you will keep being confident right up until the quarter ends.
Try one question on your next forecast call. Not where the deal is. Ask what is different about it than it was three weeks ago.
If the honest answer is nothing, you already have your forecast.