Start With a Free Sales Funnel Consultation
The executive revenue call starts the same way every quarter: "Which deals are closing this month?"
Around the table, sellers recite their pipeline. Confident close dates. Promising conversations. The forecast shows $10 million in opportunities for the quarter.
Thirty days later, 35% of those deals close.
The uncomfortable truth: most of what sits in your pipeline isn't real. It's wishes dressed up as opportunities.
In many organizations, close dates are hopes, not commitments. Deals push quarter after quarter. The symptoms: too much "fluff" in the forecast, opportunities that stall without anyone knowing why, deals that weren't opportunities to begin with.
Someone downloads a whitepaper or agrees to a demo, and suddenly they're "qualified." The seller adds them to the pipeline.
But there is a difference between engagement and commitment.
The common mistake: if they talk to me, they're in an active buying cycle. They're not. And treating them like they are wastes time on prospects who can't or won't act.
Deals stall because sellers track activity (did the demo, sent follow-up) instead of buyer commitment. This creates pipelines where the seller is only talking to one person, the client hasn't explored the problem, and there's no evidence the buyer can actually act.
Without those, you don't have an opportunity.
I briefly break down the qualification challenge in the video here.
The shift required is moving from assumption-based to evidence-based qualification. Most sellers qualify based on how they feel about a conversation. But feelings aren't forecasts.
Evidence is observable buyer behavior:
The shift from "they seemed interested" to "here's what they did" changes everything.
Traditional frameworks like BANT assume the buyer is already evaluating. But qualification isn't a single checkpoint. It's continuous. Buyers move forward and backward as information emerges and priorities shift.
Rather than looking for reasons to keep an opportunity in your pipeline, look for reasons to remove it. More than half of potential buyers are comfortable enough that they won't act. These prospects belong in nurture campaigns, not your active pipeline.
At any given time, only about 3% of potential buyers are actively evaluating. Another 40.5% are beginning to experience dissatisfaction but aren't yet urgent. The remaining 56.5% aren't ready because status quo is acceptable enough.
Rushing to demonstrate your solution with someone still exploring scares them off. Until a buyer has articulated why change matters and what success looks like, they're not ready.
Most CRMs define stages by seller activity: demo completed, proposal sent. This tracks your process, not the buyer's journey.
Redefine based on buyer evidence:
Manager pipeline reviews should ask: "What evidence do you have?" If the seller can't answer with concrete examples, the opportunity moves backward or out.
Qualification isn't a step in your sales process. It is your sales process. Pipelines built on evidence close predictably. Pipelines built on hope don't.
Every organization needs to approach qualification differently based on their sales challenge and buyer behavior. Our eBook, Lead Qualification Clarity: How to Prioritize and Pursue Prospects, walks through how to create a qualification approach tailored to your business.
Download the eBook now and start building a pipeline you can trust.
