A sales team: the pipeline keeps itself

The reading

A six-person sales team at a specialist industrial firm. Average sales cycle, four months. Average deal size, six figures. The team spent its mornings in meetings and on calls, which was the correct use of the mornings. The afternoons were spent writing up the mornings — call notes, stage updates, forecast corrections — which was not the correct use of the afternoons.

Roughly two days a week per salesperson went to this. Twelve person-days a week across the team. The sales director had tried three times to fix it with better forms, shorter templates, and automated reminders. Each intervention had reduced the burden for about a quarter before it crept back, because the underlying job — re-entering, in a different form, information that had already been written down somewhere — had not changed.

The underlying job

Each stage of the pipeline is a decision: should this deal move forward, be nurtured, be killed? The decision is made in correspondence — a call, an email, a reply, a meeting. The correspondence contains the evidence for the decision. The pipeline, under the old regime, was the salesperson re-stating the evidence for the manager, in a form the manager could skim, on a schedule the manager had set.

The re-stating was the two days a week. The correspondence had already happened. The salesperson was being asked to translate it.

What we built

The pipeline is a side-effect of the correspondence. A call ends and the salesperson speaks their note into the phone. The note is attached to the deal record, the deal’s stage is proposed by the record on the strength of the note, and the next-step reply is drafted and placed in the salesperson’s outbox for approval. The salesperson reads the draft, edits where it reads wrongly, and sends. The pipeline updates itself.

The salesperson writes nothing by hand that is not part of the correspondence. The manager’s report is the pipeline, which is now real, because it is the correspondence itself rather than a summary of it.

Nine weeks from enquiry to the first pipeline update not written by hand.

The numbers at ninety days

What	Before	Ninety days in
Days per salesperson / week on paperwork	~ 2	~ 0.1
Call notes attached to a deal (same day)	1 in 3	all
Stage updates lagging the correspondence	~ 2 weeks	real-time
Replies pre-drafted for approval	0	every one
Forecast accuracy at 60 days out	± 35%	± 8%

The forecast accuracy figure is the one the partners talk about. The pipeline was not more honest before — it was less observed. The team now reads the forecast and makes commercial decisions on it, which it did not previously have the standing to do.

What this is not

It is not an automation of the salesperson. The salesperson still makes every call, writes every intent, and sends every reply. What has stopped is the second writing — the re-statement, in a different form, of work already done.

It is not a replacement for the sales director’s judgement. The pipeline proposes a stage; the salesperson can accept or override it. The sales director reads the pipeline and the overrides and knows where the judgements are being made and by whom.

The standard

A new salesperson should be contributing to the pipeline by the end of the first week. That is the test. The system takes the correspondence and produces the record; the salesperson does not need to learn a parallel reporting language before they can be useful.

The pipeline keeps itself. The salespeople sell.