You told us you believed there was money on the table and could not point at it. We think you are right, and we can tell you why nobody in the business can point at it.
Your sales machinery works wherever something forces it to — at the checkpoints where a deal moves from one stage to the next. Between those checkpoints, nothing is watching, and behaviour quietly drifts. Nothing in your business measures whether any of it is working. That is why the leak is invisible rather than small.
Why you asked us in
Three things were said to us at the start. They turned out to be a good description of the problem, and worth repeating before the findings.
“We think there’s money on the table. We can’t point at it.”
Chief Revenue Officer“The good ones clearly have a method. Nobody can tell me what it is.”
Regional Sales Director“Two firms have pitched. Both sounded right. Neither could show me anything.”
Finance DirectorYou did not want to fund six weeks of investigation to be told what you already suspected. That is a reasonable position, so we did something quicker first.
We used a structured questionnaire assessment. Eight of your leaders and managers were invited and six completed it, each taking about fifteen minutes. It covers seven areas of running a sales pipeline, from creating new business through to closing.
It works by asking two things about every part of the pipeline, and comparing the answers.
For each part there is something you would expect to find — a written process, a checklist, a report, an agreed rule. We checked for 73 of these and recorded whether each was in place, half-built or absent.
Each of those 73 things exists to stop a particular problem. So we asked the people doing the job how often they still hit that problem. Where the two answers disagreed, we took the worse one. A process people work around is a document, not a process.
This is a fast diagnosis, not an audit. It is designed to tell you where to look and what it would be worth investigating, at a fraction of the cost of finding out the slow way. Page 8 is honest about what it cannot yet tell you.
What we found
Of the 73 things we checked for, 21 are fully in place. Every single one of them is a basic — something that describes how the work should be done.
Not one of the things that would tell you whether the work is actually being done was found complete. That is the finding, and everything else in this report follows from it.
Each step depends on the one below it. For each, the first bar shows how much is actually in place. The second shows how many of that step’s problems your people say they still hit.
What it means for the business
That is not a hedge. It is the finding stated as a business problem: the reason nobody can point at the leak is that nothing in your sales operation measures it. Here is what that costs you in practice, and the evidence behind each one.
Nothing defines what a stalled deal looks like, and nothing warns you before one slips out of the quarter. Both are absent, not half-built. Your forecast describes what happened rather than giving anyone a chance to change it.
All six said stalled deals are noticed at quarter end. All six said deals slip with no warning.
Opportunities are judged once when they arrive and never re-tested as they move. Selling time goes into deals that were never going to close, and the forecast carries them until the quarter ends.
Five of six said weak opportunities stay in the forecast too long — the strongest answer available.
The rules for deciding which deals to chase have not been revisited in light of recent losses, and nothing examines the deals you walk away from. Losses are absorbed rather than learned from.
Five of six said the criteria have not changed despite what recent losses showed.
When one team finds a better way, there is no route for it to reach the others. You pay for the learning once and collect a fraction of the return. This is the single clearest signal in the whole assessment.
Six of six on two separate questions: improvements do not reach other teams, and campaign learning stays with the team that ran it.
There is no record of what was coached, so no one can say whether coaching changes how a deal goes. Your managers may be spending their most valuable hours well. Nobody can demonstrate it either way.
All six said nobody can tell whether coaching changed a deal.
How long a new seller takes to become productive is not tracked, and there is no written description of what a good seller does. Both would be needed to plan headcount against a revenue target with any confidence.
Five of six said nobody can say how long ramp-up actually takes.
Area by area
A pipeline is a chain. If deals are sorted badly at the front, excellent reporting later just describes the wrong deals more accurately — so your overall position is set by your weakest area, not your average. The average would say 2.4 out of five. The rule says 1.7.
| Area | Score | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Finding and creating new businessDemand and Pipeline Creation | 1.7 | Nobody complains about it, and half of what it needs was never finished. Coverage is not planned against target, and marketing is never told what converted. This one area sets the score for the whole business. |
| Deciding which deals to chaseOpportunity Qualification | 2.2 | Rules exist, but each team applies them differently and the information behind them is incomplete. This is where weak deals enter and stay. |
| The basics: roles, process, CRMPipeline Foundations | 2.3 | Strong on paper — genuinely so. People follow it at the checkpoints and drift in between, and nothing samples the gap. |
| Running a deal to closeSales Execution | 2.3 | Well documented. Nothing at all in place to spot a deal stalling or to warn you before one slips. |
| Skills and developmentPeople and Skills | 2.3 | No written description of what a good seller does, so capability cannot be assessed, coached against or planned for. |
| Running and improving the pipelineGovernance and Improvement | 2.3 | The meetings happen. Decisions are not recorded, the same items return, and improvements do not travel between teams. |
| Systems and dataTechnology and Data | 3.3 | Your strongest area, and the tools are not the problem. Nobody owns whether the data in them is right. |
| Overall position | 1.7 | Set by the weakest area, not the average of 2.4 |
Your systems are fine. If the instinct in the room is to fix this with technology, the evidence says that would be spending money where you are already strongest. What is missing is not a tool. It is anybody being accountable for looking.
Why it is happening
The same underlying gap produces two different symptoms, depending on whether anyone is feeling the pain.
Your process is followed properly when a deal moves stage, and worked around in between. Records are complete at the point of handover and go stale afterwards. Both of these have a real, confirmed process behind them.
It works exactly as far as somebody is looking, and stops there.
In finding and creating new business, not one person reported a problem at the two lower levels. No friction, no workarounds, no grumbling. And yet the coverage plan, the recording of where deals come from and the feedback to marketing are all half-built.
Nothing ever told anyone it was unfinished, so nobody finished it. That is the area now setting your score.
Worth stating plainly, because it is the obvious conclusion and the evidence does not support it. We asked directly. Do two sellers work the same deal in completely different ways? Not reported. Do new starters just work it out by watching others? All six said never.
The variation is between teams, not between individuals — which makes it a management question, not a performance one.
“Half the team still runs their own tracker because the CRM view does not match how we actually sell.”
Rob S“Nobody tells us when the playbook changes. I found out from a customer.”
Jack Voss“There is a territory map in the shared drive that predates the reorg — people still use it.”
Amara DialloA playbook nobody was told had changed. A territory map that outlived the reorganisation it described. A system view that stopped matching how people sell. None of these is a missing thing. Each is a thing that quietly stopped matching reality, and nobody found out for months.
What we would do
There are 43 things worth acting on. Forty of them split almost exactly in half, and the order matters more than the list. The remaining three are held together by individuals rather than by anything written down; they follow whichever half they sit in.
A coverage plan built from what actually closed. Recording where deals come from. A completeness check on qualification. A written description of what a good seller does. Clear rules for entering and leaving each stage.
Your weakest area depends almost entirely on this group.
Sampling practice between the checkpoints rather than only at them. Holding deal review on a fixed rhythm even when nothing is wrong. Recording decisions in the meeting. Giving data quality a named owner with authority to change the system.
None of this is expensive. All of it is currently nobody’s job.
Put the checking in alongside the building, not after it. This business has demonstrably built things and then lost them — twenty-nine half-built items are the evidence. Build first and finish later, and in twelve months you would be buying the same twenty things a second time.
First, somebody senior has to own the looking. Every gap on page 4 exists because no role currently includes it. That is a decision about accountability, and it cannot be delegated into a process.
Second, the answers people gave us must never be used to judge the people who gave them. Your assessment was attributed, not anonymous. If those answers ever inform a decision about an individual, you will have punished the candour you asked for, and the next measurement will be worthless because everyone will answer defensively.
Conclusion
You asked whether there is money on the table. On the evidence, yes — and the reason you cannot point at it is structural rather than mysterious.
Revenue is growing but not predictably, and that is exactly what this shape of business produces. Your sales machinery is genuinely well documented. It is enforced at the checkpoints and unobserved everywhere else, so results depend on who happens to be paying attention that quarter. When a good manager is watching, the numbers are good. When attention moves, performance drifts, and nothing surfaces it until the quarter closes.
Your Regional Sales Director said the good ones clearly have a method and nobody can say what it is. We think that is literally true. The method exists, in individual heads, and there is no mechanism for it to travel — six of six people told us improvements made by one team never reach the others. You are running a business that learns constantly and retains almost none of it.
The good news is the shape of the fix. You do not need a large technology programme; systems are your strongest area. Most of what you need already exists in draft. The gap is accountability for looking, and that is cheaper to close than anything else on the table.
The open questions are already written down and ranked, so there is nothing to scope. It is a working session with the people who know the answers, recorded as we go, after which the assessment is recalculated and produces a plan with timescales — which we would bring back to work through and agree with you.
One week. A day and a half of our time. £1,725. You keep the corrected assessment and the agreed plan whether or not you ask us to do anything further.
Sunshine Power — sales pipeline review, report to the leadership team. Structured questionnaire assessment completed August 2026 by six of the eight leaders and managers invited, covering seven areas, 73 evidence checks and 73 matching problem statements. Scored automatically; where the two readings disagreed the lower was taken, and the weakest area sets the overall position. Forty-two questions remain open and are listed in the supporting detail. Nothing in this report is asserted without evidence behind it, and where we are unsure we have said so.