Deal Autopsy —
Section 01 of 04

Reps conflate "they seemed interested" with "budget is approved." These are not the same thing. One is a conversation. The other is a purchase order. The forecast only cares about the second one.

If the rep cannot name a specific conversation, email, or internal document in which the economic buyer confirmed available budget, the deal is not in this quarter. It is in the rep's optimism.

A real champion sells internally on your behalf. They forward your deck without being asked. They CC you on emails you shouldn't have seen. A passive contact is not a champion. They are a friendly face with no power and no skin in the game.

If the answer is "never" or "I'm not sure," you do not have a champion. You have a contact. Contacts do not get deals done.

Close dates in CRMs are almost always derived from the rep's quota deadline, not from the customer's urgency. A deal without a compelling event on the customer side has no reason to close this quarter. The rep's target is not a compelling event.

If the rep cannot name a specific customer-side driver — a contract expiry, a board deadline, a product launch, a cost that starts accruing — the close date is fiction. It is a number in a field that makes the forecast look full.

Enterprise deals die in rooms the rep has never been in. A stakeholder who has never been engaged is a veto waiting to happen. The rep who believes the deal is won because their contact is enthusiastic has not mapped the buying committee. They have mapped the contact.

If the rep can only name the person they speak to — not the legal, procurement, IT, or finance stakeholders who will be involved in a decision of this size — the deal is single-threaded. Single-threaded deals slip. They do not close on time.

Reps underreport competitive presence because acknowledging competition makes the deal feel less certain. The customer who says "we're not looking at anyone else" is frequently looking at two other vendors. The rep who believes them is building a forecast on a courtesy.

If the rep's competitive intelligence comes entirely from the prospect's self-reporting, it is unreliable. Real competitive intelligence comes from procurement language, evaluation timelines, and the questions the prospect is asking.

Legal and procurement involvement is a buying signal. It means the organisation has decided to proceed far enough to allocate internal resource. The absence of legal and procurement in a deal marked as close-ready means either the organisation has not decided, or the deal has not reached the people who actually process purchases.

If legal and procurement are not engaged and the deal is in the current quarter's committed forecast, the timeline is wrong. Legal review alone can add four to eight weeks. Nobody told the CRM.

A deal where the customer has never pushed back is not a deal. It is a series of pleasant conversations. Real buying processes involve objections, scope questions, and commercial friction. A prospect who has agreed with everything has not bought. They have been polite.

The absence of objection in an enterprise deal is a red flag, not a green one. It means either the evaluation is not serious, or the rep has not asked the questions that would surface resistance. Either way, the deal is not as solid as the forecast suggests.

Deals without next steps are not in motion. They are in memory. A rep who describes the deal's progress in terms of conversations rather than agreed actions has lost control of the process. The customer is not buying. They are being waited on.

If the last agreed next step is more than two weeks old, or cannot be described with a specific date and deliverable, the deal has stalled. The forecast entry is describing a deal that was in motion, not a deal that is in motion.

Deals that live entirely in the rep's head are fragile. If the institutional knowledge about the deal — the relationships, the history, the objections, the internal politics — cannot be reconstructed from the CRM and documented communications, the deal is one person deep. One person deep is a risk the forecast has not priced in.

If the honest answer is "it would probably die," the deal is not an organisational asset. It is a personal one. The forecast is treating personal assets as organisational certainties.

A deal that has moved its close date once will move it again unless the underlying reason for the slip has been addressed. Reps rationalise slippage as external — budget cycles, stakeholder changes, procurement delays. The question is whether anything structural has changed, or whether the new close date is the old close date plus 90 days.

If the deal has slipped more than once and the rep's answer to "what's different" is a feeling rather than a fact, the deal will slip again. The forecast entry is a comfort blanket with a close date.