Warning signals
- Response time varies by day or person
- No one owns the next action
- Pipeline stages describe activity rather than buyer decisions
- Proposals disappear without a defined follow-up sequence
- The business cannot explain why qualified opportunities are lost
Self-audit questions
- What must happen in the first fifteen minutes, day and week?
- What makes an inquiry qualified?
- Which buyer decision advances each stage?
- Who owns every open opportunity?
- What evidence or objection blocks the next step?
The 30/60/90 repair sequence
Days 1–30 · Establish truth
- Map inquiry sources, handoffs and response time
- Define qualification and disqualification criteria
- Rename stages around buyer commitments
- Create required next-action and owner fields
Days 31–60 · Repair the mechanism
- Implement response and follow-up sequences
- Standardize discovery and proposal evidence
- Create lost-reason and no-decision tracking
- Review pipeline weekly by constraint
Days 61–90 · Prove and operationalize
- Measure stage conversion and time-in-stage
- Repair the largest decision bottleneck
- Automate reminders without automating judgment
- Build a forecast grounded in verified next actions
Measures that matter
- Median response time
- Stage conversion
- Time to decision
- No-decision rate
Decision gate
Do not add volume until the mechanism is becoming more reliable.
At day 90, continue only what has a named owner, a visible measure and evidence that the constraint is weakening.
Work through the constraint