The job
Fifty deals in the pipeline. Most are moving. Three have gone dark (no email opened in two weeks, no call scheduled, no activity in the CRM). The rep doesn’t notice because the rep is busy closing warm deals. Meanwhile, those three deals are actually dead.
Pipeline hygiene review scans every open deal once a week. Flags the ones that have gone cold. Proposes the move for each (follow-up email, escalation call, disqualification). The rep gets a report, not a list.
Plated well: Friday morning, the rep reads the hygiene report. “Deal A is cold. Recommend: follow-up call.” The rep decides yes or no. Thirty seconds per deal. The pipeline doesn’t leak.
The recipe
All seven ingredients still apply. The leverage on this dish is Measurement (Ingredient #6). Hygiene only works when you define cold once and apply it consistently.
Training sets what “moving” looks like at your company (activity weekly? timeline clear? next step defined?). Examples show what cold and warm look like in your CRM. Measurement is the load-bearing ingredient: define “cold” precisely (no activity in X days, no call scheduled, no email opened). The station applies this metric every deal, every week, with no bias. Guardrails protect against over-aggressive disqualification. Output Over Process says: tell the station the destination: “flag the deals I need to decide on” and let it decide which deals qualify.
How to build it
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Define “cold” precisely. What is the signal? No activity in 14 days? No email opened in 21? No next step scheduled? Write the exact rule.
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Define “warm” and “hot”. So the station can categorize, not just flag cold deals.
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Set the activity window. Do you measure activity in the last 7 days? 14? 21? Be specific.
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Write the proposed actions. Cold deal flagged: what should the rep do? “Recommend follow-up call on Tuesday.” “Recommend: disqualify if no response by Friday.” Be specific, not generic.
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Set the guardrails. The station never auto-disqualifies. It flags and recommends. The rep decides. The station never ignores a deal that is less than 30 days old even if it appears cold.
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Define the report format. How should the hygiene report read? One-liner per cold deal? A summary paragraph? Show it.
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Run the first scan manually. Read your 50 open deals. Mark which are cold. Compare to what the station flags. Did the station miss any? Did it flag false positives? Calibrate.
What breaks it
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Definition of cold drifts. You define “no activity in 14 days” as cold. By week three, a deal with 12 days of silence gets flagged but shouldn’t. Recalibrate weekly. Cold doesn’t change.
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Activity measurement is incomplete. The station reads email opens and call scheduling. It doesn’t read Slack mentions or coffee meetings. The rep had coffee with the prospect yesterday. The station marks it cold. Create a weekly review window for the rep to mark deals as warm if activity exists outside the CRM.
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Rep ignores the hygiene report. The report comes every Friday. The rep doesn’t read it. By week three, deals that should have been followed up on are forgotten. Make the report visible. Maybe they read it differently: Slack notification, text alert, whatever makes them attend.
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Over-recommendation on action. The station recommends calling on a deal that just went cold. But you know the prospect will be in an all-hands meeting Tuesday through Thursday. The recommendation was right but poorly timed. Let the rep adjust timing.
When it’s working
By week two, the rep knows every deal that has gone cold without hunting for it. By week four, the pipeline stops leaking. Deals that go cold get a move (a call, a follow-up, a disqualification decision) instead of sitting silent.
Measure it: at the end of each week, count how many cold deals the station flagged. Measure what the rep decided. By week three, if the rep is actioning 80%+ of the flagged deals, it’s working.
Monday Move
Run the hygiene review on your current pipeline. Mark which deals are actually cold. Compare to what the station would flag if you turned on this dish. Are they aligned? If not, sharpen the definition of cold and redeploy.
Dish 6 of 10 on the Sales Station. Build-note leverage: Measurement (Ingredient #6).