Working Session • Thursday, Sept 17 • 1:00-2:00pm ET
The Pipeline You Have vs.
The Pipeline You Think You Have
We'll be working on two sales plays that clear the junk out of your funnel and turn your forecast into something you can fully and finally trust. Bring your actual pipeline. Leave with a clean pipeline and a clean start to Q4!
Be honest for a second
Open your CRM. Count the open opportunities. Now count the ones with a real next step on a real calendar that the prospect actually accepted.
If the second number is dramatically smaller, you don't have a forecasting problem. You have a funnel full of deals that were never real — and a team working them over and over anyway.
Deals sit open for months. Nobody closes them, nobody kills them. They take up the space new business should occupy. Reps end up recycling the same accounts because a cluttered funnel looks a lot like a full one. And when the board asks for a number, what you present isn't a forecast. It's a collection of rep opinions.
Nobody is lazy. Nobody is lying. There's just no system for deciding what's real.
The two plays
CRM Clean-Up. Every open opportunity has a next step on the calendar, accepted by the prospect. We call it a Clear Future Date. Green check mark, or the deal isn't real. You'll get the audit, the remedy for everything that fails it, and the language reps use to get a calendar commitment from a prospect who's gone quiet.
Pipeline Cleanout. Stale deals get resolved — forward or closed. Nothing sits. You'll get an objective test for stale, plus the Close the File email. It's written to close the file, and a good percentage of the time it does the opposite: it wakes the prospect up and the deal starts moving again. Either outcome beats silence.
Run both and your CRM holds real deals. Real deals produce a forecast you can defend in the room without hedging.
The details
When: Thursday, Sept 17 • 1:00-2:00pm
Where:Â Live on Zoom
Bring:Â An export of your open opportunities (with last activity and next scheduled step), and whichever of your sales leaders should be running this with you.
Who should be in the room
VPs of Sales, CROs, and sales leaders who own a forecast number. B2B teams with 8+ reps and a multi-step sales cycle. Anyone who bought a CRM, did the work, and still doesn't trust what's in it.
Why Blind Zebra
We're not a sales training company. We build the Blind Zebra Sales Operating System — repeatable plays that turn your sales process into a system your reps and managers run every day.
CRM-agnostic. Methodology-agnostic. We don't replace Salesforce, Sandler, or Challenger. We're the execution layer that makes them work.
