How Many Deals in Your Pipeline Would You Bet Your Own Money On?
David Selva · · 4 min read
Pipeline Hygiene, Solar Installers, Sales Reporting
An unpruned pipeline is not optimistic, it is uninformative — and the loss reasons you are not collecting are the report worth having.
How many of the deals in your pipeline right now would you put your own money on?
Ask a solar sales manager that and you get a pause, then a number that is a lot smaller than the one on the dashboard. Everybody knows the pipeline is inflated. Almost nobody prunes it, because removing a deal feels like giving up on revenue.
An unpruned pipeline is not optimistic, it is uninformative
The point of a pipeline is to tell you what is going to happen. Once it contains a hundred deals and you privately believe in twelve, it has stopped doing that. You are running the business off the twelve you carry in your head, and the dashboard is decoration.
That has a real cost beyond the bad forecast. Every stale deal sits in somebody's follow-up queue. Reps spend Tuesday morning calling people who decided against solar in April and never said so out loud. The activity looks like selling. It is filing.
Solar pipelines rot in specific, identifiable ways
This is not general sales hygiene. Solar deals stall for a small number of reasons, and each one has a different half-life:
- Roof condition. The homeowner needs a re-roof first. That is a real deal with a real timeline, and it is not this quarter.
- Financing declined. Sometimes recoverable with a different structure, usually not, and it goes quiet rather than getting a no.
- Permitting or utility interconnection. Genuinely out of your hands and genuinely still alive.
- The spouse. One person is sold and one is not, and the one who is not does not take your calls.
These look identical in a pipeline that only tracks stage and age. They need completely different handling, and lumping them into "follow up" guarantees you treat the re-roof lead like the declined-financing lead.
Stalled and dead are different, and the difference is a date
A stalled deal has a specific thing you are waiting on and a date when that thing resolves. Re-roof scheduled for September? That is stalled. Move it out, set the date, stop calling weekly.
A dead deal has no such thing. Nobody is waiting on anything; the homeowner just stopped answering. If you cannot name what has to happen next and roughly when, it is not stalled.
The rule I give teams: if a deal has no next step with a date on it, it does not stay in the pipeline. It gets closed with a reason, or it gets a date. Those are the two options.
Close-lost is not an admission, it is data collection
This is the part that changes the business, and it only works if you make the reason mandatory and keep the list short.
Six reason codes, maybe eight. Roof condition. Financing. Went with a competitor. Timing — not this year. No contact. Price.
Do that for one quarter and you get something you cannot get any other way: the actual distribution of why you lose. Most solar operations I have worked with assume they are losing on price, because price is what reps hear. Then the codes come back and the biggest bucket is no contact, which is not a pricing problem at all — it is a follow-up problem, and it is fixable this month.
You cannot get that number out of a pipeline where losing deals quietly disappear or sit forever at 40 percent.
The reason this is hard has nothing to do with software
Nobody wants to close-lost a deal they spent six hours on. Reps especially, if any part of comp or standing is tied to pipeline volume.
So if you turn on mandatory reason codes and change nothing else, reps will park deals in "timing" forever rather than mark them lost. You have to say out loud that the pipeline number is not the score, and then not react to it dropping by half the first month — because it will, and that first drop is the most honest the number has been all year.
What I would want to see after ninety days
Not a cleaner pipeline. A loss-reason report you believe, and one change made because of it.
If the report says no contact is your largest bucket and you have not changed anything about follow-up, the cleanup was administrative and you should not have bothered. The pruning is only worth the argument it causes if the reasons end up pointing at something you go and fix.