Pipeline clarity checker

Eight questions on how organized and predictable your pipeline actually is. Takes about two minutes, runs entirely in your browser, and tells you which dimension to fix first.

  1. 1. Close dates on open deals are dates you would defend out loud.

    If deals cluster on the last day of the quarter, those are hopes rather than dates.

  2. 2. Deals that are actually dead get closed as lost promptly.

    Count the open deals whose close date has already passed. In most pipelines it is 15 to 30 percent.

  3. 3. Each stage requires something the buyer did, not something you did.

    "Demo given" is your activity. "Buyer confirmed budget" is their evidence.

  4. 4. Two people on the team would put the same deal in the same stage.

    If stage meaning varies by rep, no forecast built on stages can work.

  5. 5. You learn a deal is slipping before the close date moves.

    Finding out when the date changes means finding out too late to act.

  6. 6. You know which deals are single-threaded on one contact.

    One contact is one point of failure, and roughly one in five change jobs during a long cycle.

  7. 7. Every open deal has a specific next step with a date on it.

    "Follow up" is not a next step. "Review call Thursday 2pm" is.

  8. 8. You start the day knowing which three deals need attention.

    If working this out takes more than five minutes, the pipeline is running you.

Why these eight questions

They cover four dimensions in the order that they have to be fixed. Data honesty comes first, because close dates that are wishes and deals that should have been disqualified corrupt everything downstream. Process definition is next: if two people would put the same deal in different stages, no forecast built on stages can work.

Risk visibility follows, since the point of a pipeline is to learn a deal is slipping before the close date moves. Action readiness is last, because information that never reaches a decision may as well not exist.

A low score is usually a process problem rather than a tooling problem, and buying software before fixing stage definitions makes the confusion faster rather than smaller. If your data and process scores are healthy and only visibility and action are weak, that is the case where tooling genuinely helps.

The Free plan covers up to 5 deals and needs no credit card.