Webinar Details
In the latest episode of We're Not On Easy Mode Anymore we get into why sales stages simplify reporting but distort reality. Deals move through effort, time, and risk...
Session Highlights
Sales stages aren’t “how deals move”
Sales stages are mostly a reporting hack. The hosts argue that stages are meant to summarize where a deal is, but deals don’t actually move linearly. Because of that, stage labels often misrepresent reality rather than clarify it.
Keep the process, question the stages
You still need a sales process. There are concrete things that must happen, like discovery, ROI validation, security review, procurement, and stakeholder alignment. The critique isn’t about process itself; it’s about forcing that messy, non-linear work into tidy stage buckets.
“Procurement” is a terrible predictor
Procurement varies wildly across companies. For one buyer it’s a week; for another it’s six months involving legal, AI review boards, or regional regulations. Two deals can share the same stage label while having completely different remaining effort and timelines.
Stages increase cognitive load for reps
The more stage definitions you add, the harder it is for reps to classify deals correctly. Ironically, making stages more granular to gain “predictive power” usually pushes them further away from how deals actually behave in the real world.
AI can replace the function of stages with better signals
Instead of “Stage 3,” the more useful signals are:
- Deal health: engagement, momentum, stakeholder pull-in, responsiveness
- Time-to-close / remaining effort: what’s left to do and how long it’s likely to take given the context
These describe reality more directly than a static label.
Disagreement is a feature, not a bug
When AI predicts a different stage or forecast than a rep, that mismatch is valuable. It creates the right 1:1 conversation. “What context do you have that the system doesn’t?” instead of “Walk me through everything for 30 minutes.”
Stages won’t disappear anytime soon
Tooling inertia keeps stages alive. Salesforce and HubSpot workflows, dashboards, and automations are built around stages, so they’ll persist even if everyone agrees they’re suboptimal.
A better metaphor than stages
A more useful mental model is a progress bar plus a “chess evaluation.” Track deal momentum over time like health and forecast moving up or down. Then show when the deal shifted and why, rather than freezing it into a single stage label.
