This project, like most of my projects, started with an audit to see how the sales team was operating. During this process, I made the unsurprising and industry-cross revelation that this company's sales reps didn’t really care about the CRM - they had a singular focus - to sell.

With the knowledge that the sales reps would be the ones operating this machine, I attempted to build a solution to fit their needs. I wanted to create something that would actually add value to the sales team, not just satisfy their managers.

The audit surfaced broader issues beyond rep behavior: generic training that missed real gaps, heavy manual data entry, and inconsistent processes across reps.

In order to make informed decisions they needed data, and in order to get reliable data they needed an aligned sales approach and a data gathering infrastructure.

Together with sales leadership, we defined a structured pipeline with measurable, event-based, binary stage criteria. We added stage properties and automated tasks, reminders, and emails to capture context with minimal friction. After a few full-team training sessions and documented guides, adoption followed naturally.

From there, we could accumulate the data needed for rep, product, industry, and company-size conversion insights. I built a weekly dashboard with continuously refined analytics, automatically delivered to decision makers ahead of GTM meetings.

For the first time, the company gained in-pipeline conversion visibility - revealing where deals fell off and why. Previously, managers mainly saw who closed the most; now they could judge the quantity and quality of each rep’s pipeline and coach with confidence.