Most founders I work with don’t have a marketing problem or a sales problem. They have a measurement problem. Their CRM is full of folklore: “qualified” means three different things to three different people, stages mean whatever the rep felt that week, and the win-rate chart on the board deck is — at best — a brave fiction.
Before you spend another zloty on outbound, before you build a data room, before you tell your investors what your payback period is: spend two days fixing the basics. Here are the fourteen things to fix, in roughly the order they bleed value out of the funnel.
Stage definitions {#stages}
If your reps can’t recite the exit criteria for each stage from memory, you don’t have stages — you have folders.
- Lead — owned by marketing. No sales action yet.
- MQL — fits ICP + has expressed intent. Sales is allowed to call.
- SQL — sales has accepted; first conversation booked.
- Opportunity — pain confirmed, budget plausible, decision-maker identified.
- Proposal — written proposal sent and discussed.
- Closed-Won / Closed-Lost — money in, or out.
Each one needs a single, unambiguous exit gate. Not a checklist of 12 things; one gate. Reps move deals because the gate is met, not because they “feel like it’s progressing.”
If two reps can disagree on what stage a deal should be in after looking at the same notes, you have a folklore problem. — Audit principle #1
Lost reasons {#lost-reasons}
The single highest-leverage report in any B2B SaaS CRM is “lost reasons, last 90 days, by source.” Almost no one reads it because almost no one has trustworthy lost-reason data.
Pick five, no more: No budget · Wrong timing · Lost to competitor · Bad fit · No decision. Make it a required field. Audit it weekly. The instant you see “Bad fit” creeping above 20%, your problem is upstream — in MQL definition or paid spend — not in sales.
Duplicate hygiene {#duplicates}
Run this query:
SELECT email, count(*) FROM contacts
GROUP BY email HAVING count(*) > 1If the result has more than a handful of rows, your reporting is lying to you. Every duplicate inflates your top-of-funnel and deflates your conversion. Merge them before you ship a dashboard anyone is meant to trust.
The minimum viable dashboard {#dashboard}
You don’t need fifteen dashboards. You need three.
- Pipeline health — open opportunities by stage, weighted by stage-conversion. Updated daily.
- Velocity — created → SQL → opportunity → closed, in days. By segment.
- Sources — pipeline created (in €) by acquisition channel, last 90 days.
If anyone on the leadership team can’t answer “how’s the funnel?” from these three views in under sixty seconds, the dashboards aren’t doing their job and need to be cut, not added to.
What to do next {#next}
If you’ve recognized your CRM in two or more of the sections above, you have a RevOps problem, not a sales problem. Doing more outbound on top of broken data just gives you broken outbound.
A four-week RevOps Audit fixes the foundations: stage definitions, KPI dictionary, the three dashboards, and a 90-day roadmap for the rest. Then — and only then — does scaling demand actually compound.