Field note: the deal that died in the QBR

I was running a mid-market team. One deal in particular kept moving from quarter to quarter. Every forecast review it was “committed, just slipping a week”. The rep was strong. The CRM told a clean story. Champion identified. Economic Buyer identified. Metrics aligned. Paper process understood.

In one QBR I did something small. I opened the last four call recordings and just listened. Not to grade the rep. To check the CRM against the calls.

The Economic Buyer had never been on a call. The rep had spoken to the champion about the EB, and had written down what the champion said the EB thought. That is not the same thing. Metrics were quoted from a discovery doc the champion sent. They had never been confirmed by the buyer’s own team. The paper process was a Google of “how does [company] buy software”.

None of this was dishonest. It was a smart rep filling in the fields with the best guess available. Which is exactly the failure mode.

We killed the deal that day. Six hundred thousand dollars of “committed” pipeline erased in a forty-minute call review. We closed the quarter better for it, because we stopped staffing effort against a deal that was never actually there.

Why I bring this up

Balance exists because that call review should not require a manager listening to four hours of recordings on a Tuesday. The system should have flagged, in the moment, that the Economic Buyer had never been in a live conversation. The stage should not have advanced without it. The forecast should have reflected reality without a human archaeologist.