Agnes Lan

A pipeline review is supposed to be an inspection. In most companies it is a recital. A rep opens the opportunity list and narrates each deal in a confident voice. The manager asks a question, nods, and moves on. Forty-five minutes later everyone agrees on a number. Nothing about the deals changed. All that changed is that the forecast now has more names attached to it, which makes it harder to question later. Here is why a status meeting produces a fictional forecast, and the eight questions...

The Q4 scramble has a recognizable shape. Somewhere in early October a leadership team looks at the gap between commit and quota, and the response is almost always the same: more activity. More calls, more outbound sequences, more pipeline generation days, a contest, a spiff, a war room on Thursdays. It feels like the right response because it feels like effort. But most of that effort lands on the wrong side of a calendar boundary the sales cycle has already drawn. The deals that will close...

There is a laptop in the site trailer with the vendor's sticker still on the lid. It was set up at kickoff, logged into once, and has not been opened since March. Next to it, on the wall, hangs the same printed daily log the crew has used for eleven years, filled in with a carpenter's pencil. Head office signed a platform contract. The field never signed anything. In between sits a gap no software licence closes, because the tool was rolled out to the jobsite instead of built with it. Here is...