Pipeline theatre
Why the dashboards are full and the quota is missed, and what a board can do about it. Written for boards, investors and chief executives of B2B software companies, and built on 356 sources opened and graded. The referenced research edition is published alongside it.
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The short version
A decade of systemising the sales process has produced more instruments and worse outcomes. Account executives at quota fell from 66% in 2022 to 48% in 2026. Sales development representatives hit quota at 60%, the lowest on record in that study. Four in five organisations missed a quarterly forecast they spend 4.9 hours a week producing.
The leading indicators boards ask for, coverage ratios and activity counts, have never been shown to predict attainment. I went looking for a dataset that links pipeline coverage to the result and could not find one. What those measures do produce, reliably, is the number the board asked for.
I call that pipeline theatre, and its audience is the board. The paper sets out what to ask for instead, and ends with seven questions a board can put to management that no dashboard as currently built can answer.
Fifteen pages, sixteen figures, no vendor deck
- Why coverage ratios and activity counts became self-fulfilling, and what stage inflation costs a forecast.
- How the instruments moved from the sales leader to revenue operations and the chief information officer, and what that does to accountability for the number.
- What the evidence actually shows about AI in selling, as distinct from what the vendors show.
- What buyers say when they are asked directly, including the ones who bought without a seller and regretted it.
- Six measures to retire, and the measure to ask for in place of each one.
- Seven questions for the next board meeting, to be answered with your own data.
Every figure in the paper is traced to a source that was opened and graded for independence. Vendor figures are labelled as vendor figures.
Seven questions for the next board meeting
These are to be answered with the company's own data, and the first answers are usually uncomfortable.
What was starting pipeline coverage against what remained to be sold at the start of each of the last four quarters, and what was the attainment that followed?
What share of opportunities moved past qualification last quarter without the qualification fields completed, and who moved them?
For the last four quarters, how far was the forecast from the result at week two, week five and week eight, and which method produced the smallest error?
Which tools did sellers use last month, by seat, and what did the unused seats cost?
Where did the hours saved by AI go, and what changed in the outcomes of the teams that received them?
What were win rate, early churn and expansion rate by buying path for the last two cohorts?
Who owns the definition of a qualified opportunity, who chose the forecasting tool, and has the revenue leader signed revenue operations' goals for the year?
The referenced edition
The paper above is the reading edition. Behind it sits the research edition, 105 pages, with every claim tagged, every source graded A to E, and the evidence ledger of 356 entries printed in full, together with the conflict log, the gap log, the decision log, the sources that could not be opened and the audit report. It is where to go if you want to check a number rather than take it.
Download the research edition The evidence ledger as a spreadsheet →
Both editions are free and neither sits behind a form. The spreadsheet adds the verbatim quotation, the stated sample, the corroboration and the research stream for every entry, so it can be sorted and filtered.
If your own answers are uncomfortable
Thirty minutes, in confidence, on what the seven questions turned up and what I would look at first.
Written by Jonathan Hobday, who works with boards, investors and chief executives of B2B software companies, leading, rebuilding or independently reviewing the sales function. Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute.