The deal that's stopped moving and nobody noticed

What "stopped" means

A workable line is two weeks with no activity on an open deal. Not because fourteen days are magic, but because it's long enough not to produce noise when a customer is simply thinking, and short enough that you can still do something.

Activity means: something happened and you wrote it down. A call, an email, a note. Not: you thought about it.

If you sell things with long lead times — construction, the public sector, framework tenders — that line can be longer. The point isn't the number, it's that there is one.

A quarter of an hour a week, three questions

Put one fixed slot in your diary. Friday afternoon works for a lot of people; so does Monday morning. You ask three questions and nothing else:

1. Where has nothing happened for more than two weeks? That's your work list for next week.
2. Which expected close dates have passed? A date that's gone by without anything changing often says more than the silence itself.
3. Which open deals have no next step? That's the real cause: a deal with no next step had already stopped before you noticed.

That's all. No reporting, no analysis, no meeting. Fifteen minutes in which you make a short list, and then ring your way through it.

What to do with what comes out

For each stalled deal you pick one of three things, and you genuinely pick one — rolling it on to next week is what makes the list grow.

Ring with a reason. Not "just checking whether you're still interested", but something from the conversation itself: the permission they were waiting on, the business partner who was due back from holiday. For that you need your notes.

Ask for a decision. After a few rounds without progress you're allowed to say it: "if this isn't going ahead that's fine too, I'll take it off my list." That produces a yes more often than you'd expect, and otherwise a clear no.

Mark it lost, with a reason. That isn't giving up. The company stays in your records and comes back round in the slow rhythm; all you're removing is the false hope. Why the reason matters is in the piece on lost deals.

Do it together, and without blame

If there's more than one of you, go through the list as a group. Not to work out who let something slide — do that and it becomes an appraisal, and everyone starts making their deals look better than they are.

The aim is to stop an opportunity disappearing because two people each thought the other had it. That's an organisational problem, not a personal failing, and you fix it by agreeing one owner per deal.

Why this is enough

You can measure your sales twenty different ways. In a firm of a few people almost all of it is noise: too few deals to draw conclusions from, and too little time to act on them.

This one check is the exception. It needs no dashboard, it works from the first week, and it finds exactly the deals you'd otherwise lose in silence.