Most CRM pipelines still describe a sale as a sequence: discovery, demo, proposal, negotiation, close. Each opportunity sits in one stage, with one close date and one probability. It is a tidy model, and it bears less and less resemblance to how organisations actually buy.

What the research says

Gartner's research on B2B buying describes a typical complex purchase as involving six to ten decision-makers, each bringing information they have gathered independently. Buyers spend only around 17% of their buying time meeting potential suppliers; the rest goes on their own research and on working things through internally. And rather than moving neatly from one phase to the next, they revisit earlier tasks, such as defining requirements or building consensus, as new information appears.

The practical consequence is that a deal is rarely in one place. It can be in security review, legal review and pricing discussions at the same time, while the champion is still building the business case. The CRM shows “Proposal, 50%”.

Why deals appear to slip

When a pipeline can show only one stage, everything else happening in the deal is invisible. A security questionnaire waits on someone's desk. A finance director appears late and asks for a new return-on-investment case. The forecast said the deal was nearly done; in reality one of several parallel tracks had never started.

Sellers then report that the deal has “gone backwards”, when the buyer was simply doing necessary work that the process had no place for.

Measure progress by evidence the buyer recognises

Mick Gosset's work at Jointflows on the composable sales funnel addressed exactly this: let a deal run several tracks in parallel, allow stages to repeat without treating it as failure, and count a stage as complete only when there is evidence the buyer recognises. That principle sits at the centre of how we work, and Evidence Based Sales makes it concrete in three ways.

  • Parallel tracks have owners. The technical, operational and financial judges each have their own criteria and their own experiment, running on its own timeline, with someone on the selling side responsible for it.
  • Exit checks replace stage probabilities. A deal does not advance because a meeting happened. It advances when a specific, checkable condition is true: the cost model has been agreed, the criteria have been played back in writing, the experiment has run against the judge's measure.
  • Loops are expected. If a new finance director arrives and wants to revisit the business case, the model goes back in front of them. That is the case being tested by a new judge, which is no cause for alarm.

What it means for the forecast

A forecast built on stage labels reflects how confident the seller feels. A forecast built on exit checks reflects what the buyer has confirmed. The second is less comfortable to look at, because the gaps are visible. That is precisely its value: a gap seen in week four can be closed, while one discovered in the last week of the quarter usually cannot.

Source: Gartner, The B2B Buying Journey.