Do you know why deals stall in your pipeline?

Ask most owners why a deal died, and you'll get a shrug. Ask what's happening to the other twelve deals in the pipeline, and you'll get silence.

Gartner puts average forecast accuracy at 47%. A coin flip. Sales people overestimate their own deal probability by 31 percentage points on average - a "70% likely" deal is often closer to 39%.

Part of the problem is basic hygiene. 79% of the deal information sales people gather never reaches the CRM, according to ESNA research. What leadership sees isn't the real pipeline. It's a guess, dressed up as data.

It's also getting harder by default. The median B2B sales cycle has stretched to 92 days in 2026, up 35% from 68 days in 2019, according to RAIN Group.

Do you know why deals stall in your pipeline, or just that they do?

UK SMEs lose an estimated £15,000 a month to a broken sales process.

That's not a hiring problem. It's a governance problem.

Fractional sales management means someone actively reviews the pipeline every week. Catching the stall before it becomes a loss, not explaining it afterwards.

XELA Partners. Powering expert success.