One pipeline, three truths
Monday, nine a.m., leadership meeting. Marketing puts the dashboard on the screen: 2.4 million in pipeline. The sales lead brought his own report, it says 1.9. And the CEO brings his Excel, maintained on Sunday evenings, which says 2.8. Twenty minutes get burned on figuring out which number is right. For the question of what should happen with the pipeline, none are left.
The reflex is always the same: we need better reporting. A new dashboard, maybe Power BI, maybe someone to unify the reports. Sounds reasonable. Solves nothing.
Because all three numbers are correct. That’s the perfidious part. Marketing counts every opportunity from stage 1, because campaign attribution hangs on it. Sales counts from qualification, because everything before that is noise anyway. And the Excel still holds two deals that were long since moved in the CRM, plus one the CEO sourced himself and that never got entered. Three sources, three definitions, three truths. Each internally consistent.
That’s not a reporting problem. That’s a data layer problem. Reporting only displays what sits underneath, and underneath, at most companies between 20 and 200 people, there is no shared answer to the simplest questions. From which stage does a deal count as pipeline? Weighted or nominal? When does a dead opportunity get kicked out? As long as every department answers those differently, every new BI tool just produces a fourth number. Nicer formatting, equally contested.
The solution is unspectacular and precisely for that reason so rare: one definition, one data source, one report. The definition gets decided once, in writing, with leadership and sales at the same table. The data source is the CRM, and only the CRM, which also means the CEO’s deal goes in there like everyone else’s. And the report gets built from that one source, the same for everyone. Marketing sees the same number as the CFO, whether they like it or not.
That’s architecture work. Fields, validations, stage logic, a few automations to clear out the legacy junk. No tool purchase, no six-month BI project, more like a week of focused cleanup in the system you’ve long been paying for.
Afterwards the Monday meeting isn’t shorter. But the twenty minutes go into deals instead of reconciling numbers.
Calculate what the question of which number is right costs you in leadership time per year. And then ask yourself why the answer is supposed to be another dashboard.
