Sales Pipeline Hygiene

Pipeline Hygiene

Audit the deals sitting in the active pipeline right now - stale deals, close-date push anomalies, missing forecast-critical fields - and turn the findings into an exception list with one disposition decision per flagged deal, a remediation and communication plan, and a measurable pass threshold. Ownership is split three ways, not shared (ORM):

• RevOps owns the definitions, the snapshot, the automation, and the pre-published data package.
• The front-line manager owns the per-deal disposition and the coaching conversation.
• The rep owns the update and the evidence.

The split is what removes the argument - the manager arrives holding specific records that failed specific rules, not a general complaint. Splitting it the other way produces meetings that run on time and change nothing.

The audit's load-bearing definitional choice comes first: meaningful activity means a change to Stage, Close Date, or Amount - not logged calls or emails (ORM). Logged touches are activity in the CRM sense, but they do not indicate the deal moved, so a rule built on them can be satisfied without any progression - which is exactly how stale pipeline survives review after review. This is a live practitioner disagreement (many tools key on last-activity date); default to the field-change definition and use last-activity as a second, independent trigger - together, never interchangeably.

Scope Boundaries

State these in the deliverable so the audit does not drift:

• This is a periodic audit of the deals in the pipeline today. Designing the standing automated reminder/nudge system that prevents staleness is a different job: the audit may recommend automating a recurring check and describe what it hands off to, but must not design alert timing, channels, or notification-fatigue policy.
• It does not audit or rewrite stage definitions or exit criteria - that is mbfinotti/revops-skills@pipeline-stage-definition-audit. Hygiene takes the existing stage set as given and inspects the deals inside it.
• It does not diagnose overall forecast reliability - that is mbfinotti/revops-skills@sales-forecast-diagnostic. Hygiene feeds it clean data; it does not fix the forecast method.
• It does not set org-wide field ownership or source-of-truth policy - that is mbfinotti/revops-skills@crm-data-governance. Hygiene checks completeness of the fields that already exist.
• It does not trace funnel revenue leakage - that is mbfinotti/revops-skills@revenue-leakage.

Interview

Ask before auditing. One question per message; multiple-choice where possible; skip anything already answered.

• What can you export or query from the system of record: open deals with stage, amount, close date, owner, last activity date, created date, next step? Stage-change history? Close-date change history? As-of snapshots?
• Which motion and segments feed this pipeline: SMB/high-velocity, mid-market, enterprise, B2C/transactional, PLG sales-assisted, mixed? Typical cycle length and deal size per segment?
• Which recurring rituals already exist - weekly forecast call, pipeline review, QBR, deal desk? The audit rides on these; it must not add a meeting.
• Which fields do forecasting and pipeline decisions actually read? (These, not all fields, are what completeness is checked against.)
• Does a written definition of "stale" or any hygiene rule already exist? Is it enforced, and by whom?
• By what date must the result land - a QBR, a forecast call, a board number? A date inside the week promotes the remediations that ship the same day (validation rules, nudges) and demotes anything needing an integration.
• Is this a one-off cleanup (pre-QBR, pre-forecast, new leader) or the start of a recurring cadence? A recurring mandate is what makes auto-capture worth its cost; a one-off run leaves it unbuilt and re-runs the same manual pass next quarter.
• What is the effort ceiling: how much added friction per deal reps will absorb, how much admin configuration time exists, and how much manager review time exists per week? A team already at its friction limit rules nudges out whatever the completeness gap says, and a thin review budget pushes the bulk/conversation split (see references/disposition-and-communication.md) toward bulk.
• Who is the manager who will work the exception list with reps, and who owns closing out dispositions?
• Any history of mass cleanups, and how did reps react? Are there known claim-only "dibs" deals - early-stage records opened just to hold an account?
• Is any compensation currently tied to CRM hygiene, field completion, or forecast accuracy?

Workflow

1. Run the Interview. Fix the audit scope: all open deals as of a stated as-of date. Freeze that snapshot - dispositions are decided against it, not a moving book.
2. Extract the data. If you can query the pipeline data directly, pull open deals plus stage-change history, close-date change history, and activity records; otherwise request an export with those named columns. Then clean and standardize before measuring anything (Umbrex's audit order):

• Map custom stages to canonical order.
• Remove test records.
• Backfill missing stage-entry dates.
• Normalize currency and timezone.

1. Size the stale layer first, using the four staleness buckets - under 90 / 90-180 / 180-365 / over 365 days since last meaningful change (ORM). Recompute coverage excluding the over-365 bucket: the gap between that and headline coverage is the honest measure of how much reporting has been overstating the quarter. If more than 20-30% of pipeline value is stale, schedule a pipeline amnesty before any enforcement (see references/disposition-and-communication.md).
2. Derive per-segment baselines from 12-18 months of closed-won history with the stale layer excluded - clean before measuring: a deal group carrying a large dead tail produces a longer, flatter close curve than its live deals actually have (ORM), corrupting the very medians the audit runs on. Compute median days-in-stage per stage per segment (median, not mean).
3. Set thresholds per segment - roughly 1.5x median for SMB/high-velocity up to 2.0x for enterprise - plus freshness windows and push triggers (Detection Rules below; derivations and fallbacks in references/detection-rules.md).
4. Run the three rule families over the snapshot. Output one row per deal per tripped rule, with the evidence that tripped it.
5. Merge flags into a per-deal exception list with pipeline value attached; second-push deals and multi-flag deals go to the top.
6. Propose a disposition per flagged deal from the taxonomy below. RevOps proposes; the manager and rep decide - flagging must never be auto-deletion, and the rep never grades their own homework. Every decided disposition gets a named owner and a recorded reason.
7. Draft the communication plan before anything is enforced or automated, and publish the exception list at least 12 hours before the meeting that works it - any meeting that starts by pulling a report has already failed (ORM). Detail in references/disposition-and-communication.md.
8. Emit the audit report (Output Shape below), section by section, for user validation.
9. Compute the KPIs and check the Pass Threshold; iterate dispositions and remediation until it holds, or schedule the gap into the next audit.
10. Wire the recurring audit into the rituals that already exist (Cadence below) and recommend automating the recurring check. The prevention layer the audit hands off to is a nudge-escalation system - Jeff Ignacio's (RevOps Impact) mechanic is the reference shape:

• Message the owner on a past-due close date.
• Increment a reminder counter.
• Add the manager at the third reminder.

Describing that handoff is in scope; designing the system is not (Scope Boundaries).