I’ve been sitting on a pile of call notes for most of this year; I’ve recorded every call since February.
Clients, prospects, and a lot of CEOs walking me through their sales org because they were thinking about bringing me in to fix it. About 115 calls. Somewhere around 45 companies. I had Claude go through all of it, pull out every sales problem someone actually described, and count how many companies had each one. Once per company, so one CEO venting for an hour doesn’t tip the scale.
Most of it I knew in my gut. What I didn’t know was how lopsided it is. Four problems show up everywhere, and then it drops off hard.
The first one is pipeline.
About 24 of the 45. And it usually has very little to do with marketing. Nobody on the sales team creates pipeline. It comes from the founder’s network, or one referral partner, or events, or inbound that has been carrying the team for two years. One company had over 70% of its pipeline coming from a single referral partner. Another had AEs who couldn’t book five meetings a week. Another ran a push where the goal was $9M of new pipeline and they created $3.9M.
Underneath that, at six different companies, were reps who have never had to hunt. They got hired into a moment where inbound was hot or the founder was handing them deals. They’re good. They close. Nobody ever taught them to build a pipeline from nothing, and nobody ever asked them to. So when that source slows down, or the company outgrows it, there’s no second engine.
The fix is boring.
Create the opportunity at the first real meeting. I had one team where reps waited until they were about 70% sure before a deal went into the CRM, which means the pipeline you can see is already half closed and there’s nothing left to coach. Give every AE a weekly pipeline-creation number and review it in the same meeting every week. Put a prospecting block on the calendar and don’t let anyone book over it.
Second is effort pointed everywhere.
Also about 24 orgs. This one makes me a little crazy because it’s so fixable. One rep had roughly 800 accounts in their book. Another company gave reps about 600 accounts each and told them to focus on 50. Which 50? Nobody knows, so the rep works whoever calls back.
Territories get drawn when the company sells one product to one kind of buyer, and then nobody redraws them when the company changes. The worst part is you stop learning anything. When a rep misses, is it the rep or the patch? You can’t tell. I’d rather a rep have a book they can actually work in a quarter, cut on whatever predicts deal size and cycle time in that market. In public safety that’s agency size. Somewhere else it’s headcount.
Third is that nobody owns revenue.
22 orgs are struggling here. This one is about people and it’s the uncomfortable one. No CRO, with the CEO covering the seat on top of running the company. A VP of Sales whose CEO goes around them to strategize directly with the reps. Managers who got promoted for being the best seller and then never got taught to coach. One manager spending about 80% of their time recruiting.
Every time a founder steps over a manager to help, the team learns the manager’s call doesn’t really count. And if you roll out a methodology to the reps and skip the managers, it won’t stick. We learned that one the hard way at Flock. Train the managers first. Then the reps.
Fourth is the forecast.
About 20. Fourteen deals sharing one close date. A pipeline where about $2.8M of $8.4M was actually qualified. Four years of CRM history with zero closed lost deals in it. Zero. Every deal alive forever.
The CRM didn’t cause that. There was just no weekly moment that forced anyone to be honest. What I keep installing is almost embarrassingly simple. Four fields on every deal: amount, close date, stage, next step. One forecast call a week that only looks at what changed since last week. A written rule for when a stale deal gets closed lost. That’s most of it.
The thing that surprised me most: founder dependence came in ninth. I think it’s because it mostly shows up mostly as the four above. When the founder steps out of the deal, the pipeline leaves with them, nobody owns the number, and the forecast falls apart. Fix those and the founder can actually leave the room.
AI came in fifteenth. No matter what the LinkedIn pundits tell you, most orgs aren’t dealing with AI as the core issue. Not even in the top 10 issues.
If you want to do this with your own calls, dump your notes in batches of ten and ask for pain points by company. Tag whether the client said it or you did. That part matters more than I expected, because it’s really easy to remember your own diagnosis as something the customer told you. Count companies, not mentions. Then check the big numbers against the transcript before you repeat them to anyone.
If you run a sales org and one of these four made you wince, start there.
Foley