The Pipeline No One's Actually Managing

Sales manager: "Where are we at with leads this month?"

Sales rep: "Good! Got a lot of hot ones in the pipeline."

Sales manager: "How many?"

Sales rep: "Like... a bunch."

This is most businesses.

I was on a call last month with a company doing $4M/year in revenue.

I asked to see their pipeline.

173 "opportunities" in there.

I started digging:

• "When did you last contact this one?"

• "What stage is this actually at?"

• "This one says 'hot lead' but the last note is from 4 months ago?"

Turns out about 60% of their pipeline was dead.

Just sitting there making them feel productive.

Here's the system we built:

Leads automatically get tagged based on behavior:

• Responded within 1 hour → "Hot"

• Responded after 1 hour → "Warm"

• No response after 2 attempts → "Cold - Nurture"

• No response after 7 days → "Dead - Archive"

Sales team only looks at Hot and Warm.

Cold leads go into automated nurture.

Dead leads get archived (but kept for retargeting later).

Result:

Pipeline went from 173 "opportunities" to 41 real opportunities.

And their close rate went from 14% to 38%.

Why?

Because they stopped wasting time on leads that were never going to close and focused on the ones that actually would.

Your pipeline isn't a graveyard for old leads.

It's supposed to tell you what's actually happening.