1. Zombie deals
Open-stage deals with no recorded activity in 60, 90, or 180+ days are fiction. Either re-engage, disqualify, or close them out. Until you do, your pipeline number is not a number a CEO should quote.
Our audit surfaces these bucketed by how long they've been dormant — typically the 180+ bucket is where most of the trapped dollar value sits.
- Filter: stage not in {won, lost, closed}, last_interaction > 60 days ago.
- Per-deal decision: re-engage, disqualify, or close-lost.
- Set a recurring sweep — zombies are a flow, not a one-off cleanup.
2. Ownership vacuum
Deals owned by a deactivated rep accumulate silently. Every quarter someone leaves, every quarter a few dozen deals stop having an active human behind them, and every quarter the forecast is quietly worse.
Reassign using the deal's own context: who's the most recent active participant? Lock in an ownership pattern that survives future offboarding — usually "account owner moves on offboarding" set as a workflow rule.
3. Stage distribution anomaly
If more than 40% of your open deals sit in a single non-terminal stage, that stage is doing too much work. Most commonly it's "Qualified" or "Proposal" — the catch-all where reps park anything that isn't clearly moving.
Fix by either splitting the stage into two (e.g. "Qualified — intro call" vs "Qualified — demo scheduled") or by tightening the exit criteria so reps stop parking deals there.
4. Stuck in status
Separately from the zombie check: deals that have been in the same status for 90+ days, regardless of activity. Even active reps can park deals here if the next-step isn't obvious. Use this to identify process gaps, not just rep behaviour.