How to clean a pipeline before the quarter review

The pipeline total on screen says the quarter is safe. Someone in the room knows a good part of it is old. A review run on that list wastes its hour on deals nobody believes in, and the shortfall appears in the last fortnight with no warning. So the day before the review, take every open deal and put it in one of five piles. The piles are: alive with a date, alive without a date, quiet but worth one more call, dead but not yet closed, and duplicate. Ask three questions of each. For a pipeline of a few hundred deals this takes an afternoon, and the review that follows argues about real money instead of ghosts.

Do it the day before, with the salespeople in the room

Not on the morning of the review. Salespeople need time to answer for deals that move, and you need an evening to look at what the cleaned list says. A cleaned list is smaller, and the smaller number is the true one.

Three questions for every open deal

Sort the list by last activity, oldest first, and ask these of each deal.

When did the buyer last do something? Not when the salesperson last looked at it. A reply, a call, a visit, a returned document. If nobody knows, read the messages.

What is the next step, and on what date? A next step without a date is a wish. A date in the past is a miss.

Would you be surprised if they ordered? If yes, the deal is not alive. It is a quick test of staleness, so answer it honestly.

The five piles

Place each deal in exactly one:

1. Alive with a date. Leave it alone.
2. Alive, no date. The buyer is active but the record is not. Set a date today.
3. Quiet but worth a call. One call or message this week and a date to decide. No reply by that date, and it moves to pile four.
4. Dead. The buyer said no, bought elsewhere, or has not answered a call or message. Close it as lost with a reason from your fixed list.
5. Duplicate. One buyer under two records, or two names for one company. Merge.

Count each pile before and after. State your age line before you start: a deal with no buyer activity for a period you choose is closed once one call or message has gone unanswered. Fixing the line first stops you deciding each case on mood.

Duplicates: search by phone number first

Duplicates come in three shapes: one person entered twice with different spellings, one company with two contacts shown as two deals, and one enquiry entered by both the salesperson and the front desk. Search by phone number first, since a number is harder to misspell than a name. Then try the company name, using only its first word.

Keep the record with more history, and copy the notes and dates across before removing the other. Tell both owners what you merged in one line. When you cannot tell whether two records are the same buyer, leave both and put a note for the owner to confirm. A wrong merge is harder to undo than a duplicate.

A carpet exporter in Bhadohi

Here is an invented example. An exporter in Bhadohi sells hand-knotted carpets to importers and interior firms abroad, through email and trade fairs. The pipeline held close to two hundred open deals, and the partner who reviewed it always saw a large total.

Sorted into piles, about a third of the deals had no buyer activity since the previous fair, and many had no date. Some importers appeared twice, once after the fair and again after a sample request. The deal that had hurt most went unnoticed: an importer marked "negotiating" for months had stopped replying, and the forecast still counted the order.

The exporter closed the dead pile, merged the duplicates and gave every living deal a date. The total fell sharply. But the first pass went too far: a European buyer was closed purely on silence, and a week later that buyer wrote, apologising: they had been waiting for their own container season to open. The exporter added a condition to pile four: no deal is closed on silence alone without one call or message. A buyer who answers with a reason for waiting goes to pile three with a date.

The next review was shorter. The forecast was still off, because two large orders slipped into the following quarter, but the partner at least knew which deals they were and could trust the rest of the list.

What the clean-up cannot do

It will not make the pipeline healthy. A clean list is honest, and honesty may show you have too few deals. That is better learnt before the quarter closes than after.

It also relies on exit rules for each stage. If stages are vague, deals drift back to the same state. Our post on pipeline stages with exit rules and owners shows how to write them.

When one afternoon is not enough

With thousands of records spread across several sheets and tools, you cannot clean everything in one sitting. Clean the open deals first, since they drive the review, and handle the contact list separately using how to clean and organise CRM data. If most deals have no dates at all, add a next-date field before cleaning, or every deal lands in pile two.

A team that closes dead deals as they die needs far less of the afternoon. The rest of our sales work sits under sales.

Print the open deals and block the afternoon

Choose the day before the review, export the open deals, and sort them into the five piles with the salespeople present. Pipeline hygiene and governance is the service for setting up the rules that keep it clean, and if the list is too tangled to start alone, tell us what you need.