Field note
When the pipeline is a courtesy, not a path
· Aisha Rahman
The skipped stage
In a Kinrara engagement last year, the CRM showed seven stages from lead to closed-won. Interviews showed four. The missing three were still required in the system, so people dragged cards through them on Friday afternoon so the forecast would not look empty.
That is not laziness. It is a team protecting a report that leadership still reads. The application had become a courtesy to the dashboard, not a path the work actually follows.
What an audit does with that
We do not start by adding training. We sit with two live deals and write the real path beside the official one. The finding is usually specific: a qualification step that happens on WhatsApp, a handover that happens in a corridor, a discount approval that lives in email.
Once those are named, you can decide whether the CRM should absorb them or whether the stage model should shrink. Either choice is better than seven stages that exist only so a report has columns.
A question for the next scoping call
Ask someone who closed a deal last month to share their screen and click through the record as they talk. If they apologise for the stages, you already have the first observation. We can help you write the rest.