Catch the deals going quiet before they die

Deals rarely die of a decision. They die of silence, and silence is invisible on a pipeline board because a stalled deal and a healthy one look identical until someone checks the dates.

Work out your real cycle length first

Do not guess this. Ask.

Look at the deals we have closed in the last six months, won or lost. For
each one, how many days passed between the last logged activity and the
close? Give me the median and the spread.

Then tell me what a normal gap looks like at each stage. Early
conversations and late-stage negotiations should not have the same clock.

Most people discover their real number is shorter than the one they had in their head. That number is what the rest of this is built on.

Ask for the reason, not just the list

A list of stale deals is a report. A list of stale deals with what happened last is a to-do list, and the difference is entirely in the prompt.

Every Wednesday at 9am, review our open deals.

Flag any deal where the last logged activity is older than the normal gap
for its stage. For each one tell me:
  the deal, its value and its stage
  how long it has been quiet
  what the last thing that happened actually was
  who owns it

Sort by value, not by how quiet they are. If nothing is stale, say so and
stop.

Sorting by value rather than by staleness is deliberate. The oldest quiet deal is usually the one that is already dead, and putting it at the top means the report opens with the least useful item on it. You want the big deal that went quiet eight days ago, not the small one that went quiet in March.

Read the first one against your own memory

Run it once by hand before scheduling it. You will already know the truth about half these deals, and comparing that to what the report says is the fastest way to find out whether your activity logging is good enough to trust.

If the report says a deal is quiet and you know you spoke to them yesterday, the problem is not the report. It is that the conversation never got logged, and no amount of automation fixes a pipeline nobody writes into.

Close the loop

Once the report is right, the natural next step is to have the employee draft the re-engagement rather than just naming the deal. Ask for a draft per flagged deal that references the last real thing that happened, and hold them all for your approval.

What good looks like

On Wednesday you get four deals instead of forty, sorted by what they are worth, each with a sentence reminding you where it stalled.

The signal it is working is not the report itself. It is that the number of deals on it goes down over the following month, because the ones that were quiet for no reason stopped being quiet.

Also covers

Logging every call, email and note back into the CRM. This is the prerequisite the report above quietly depends on, and it is worth stating plainly: the CRM is part of Tenfold, so activity logging needs nothing connected.

An employee that handled a conversation can record it as it happens.

Whenever you answer a customer or prospect, log the activity against their
contact and any open deal: what it was about, what was agreed, and what
happens next.

Log what happened, not your view of how it went. "Asked about pricing for
30 seats" is useful in six months. "Positive call" is not.

The reason to care is directly upstream of everything else in this playbook. A stale-deal report is only as good as the record it reads, and the most common finding on a first run is not that deals are quiet — it is that conversations happened and were never written down.