The situation

Fendrix was three years into rapid growth. 120 employees, a B2B SaaS platform in the workflow automation space, and a sales team that had scaled from 4 to 15 reps over 18 months. The HubSpot instance had grown with the team but the processes hadn't kept pace. By the time the VP of Sales brought us in, the pipeline report showed $4.2M in open deals — but leadership had stopped trusting the number.

The specific problem: close dates were being pushed consistently, deals were sitting in the same stage for weeks without activity, and forecast accuracy had deteriorated to the point where the quarterly number was more of an estimate than a projection. The VP wanted to know how much of the pipeline was real.

What we found

We extracted full stage history for every open deal and built a health score based on three variables: days in current stage relative to the average for that stage, close date movement history, and recency of rep activity. The results were stark.

Of the $4.2M in pipeline, $1.2M was in deals that scored as high-probability stalls: deals where stage duration exceeded 2x the average, close dates had been pushed at least twice, and no activity had been logged in the preceding 14 days. These weren't lost deals. They were deals where the sales motion had stopped and nobody had made a decision about what to do next.

When we segmented the stalled deals by stall type, three patterns emerged. A third had proposals out with no follow-up. Another third had gone quiet after a discovery call with no next step established. The final third had active conversations that had slowed to one or two exchanges per month, usually because the rep was waiting on the prospect to act.

The rep compliance data added context: 40% of deals in the pipeline had fewer than 5 activities logged over their full lifetime, which meant either the rep was working them without logging or the deals had never been genuinely worked. The activity-to-close correlation in the historical data was clear: deals with fewer than 8 logged activities closed at a 9% rate. Deals with 15 or more closed at 41%.

What changed

We built a recovery playbook matched to each stall type. Proposal-out deals got a structured re-engagement sequence with a clear decision deadline. Discovery-stalled deals got a qualification call designed to either advance or close. Slow-conversation deals got an executive escalation template the reps could use to create urgency without pressure.

The VP personally reviewed the top 20 stalled deals and took direct action on 8 of them. Of those 8, 5 converted to active pipeline within 30 days. Of the $1.2M identified as stalled, $400K was closed within 60 days and another $320K moved to active pipeline with clear next steps.

The process changes — stage exit criteria, activity minimums, close date discipline — reduced average sales cycle by 18% in the following quarter by eliminating the pattern of deals drifting rather than being worked or disqualified.