Rebuilding a sales lifecycle on real conversion data, and enforcing it with stage gates

The problem

The play

1. 1
   Lifecycle redesign on observed behavior, not assumptionsSalesforce

   Rebuilt the end-to-end sales lifecycle into a single consolidated Salesforce SOP, re-deriving stage conversion and close rates from a locked 24-month cohort of roughly 1,650 opportunities and about 4,000 stage transitions, so the funnel described what reps actually did rather than what the process assumed.

2. 2
   Stage gating specced and stood up in production

   Specced roughly 15 gating fields and 8 strategic validation rules and stood them up in production for both new-business and expansion record types, forcing qualification data to be captured before a deal could advance. LeanScale wrote the spec; the customer's own admin built to it, which kept the enforcement layer maintainable in-house.

3. 3
   Closing the sync loophole behind the gatesSalesforce

   Documented the HubSpot–Salesforce bidirectional sync and set the marketing platform's deal fields to defer to the CRM, so an inbound sync could no longer overwrite gated fields and quietly un-gate a deal that had never met the criteria.

4. 4
   Backfilling the field the gates depend on

   Backfilled the commercial-model field across open opportunities, taking it from blank on nearly all of roughly 650 open records down to fewer than 20 remaining, and those on record types that were out of scope.

5. 5
   Forecasting, enablement and renewal playbooks

   Delivered a stage-based forecasting specification aligned to the new gates, a six-section sales-enablement framework, and a renewal-and-expansion lifecycle playbook for the in-house team to train reps against, so the gates arrived with the training to support them.

6. 6
   Executive reporting on a bow-tie modelSalesforce

   Connected a BI layer to Salesforce to give leadership deal-velocity reporting on a bow-tie funnel model, answering the executive ask for a single place to see where the business was winning.

What it moved

From a LeanScale case studyRead the full case study →