Count the market. Find the gate. Score the engine.
Six steps in a fixed order, because the first one changes every conversation about pipeline that follows it. Nothing here is proprietary language I made up so it would sound like a product. It is the order I work in.
Count the market
Every bank and credit union in the country, scored against what your product actually needs. Asset size, charter, branch count, staffing, and the conditions specific to what you sell. You get a number and a named list in priority order.
Find the gate
Work out which structural condition decides whether your deals can close. Then walk your open pipeline and flag every deal that cannot close inside the forecast window because of it, no matter how good the last call felt.
Score the engine
Twenty questions on the machine underneath the number. Where deals enter, what qualifies them, who owns the forecast, and what the CRM is actually recording. That last one is where the Method Check runs. You name the sales methodology your team was trained on (MEDDPICC, SPIN, Gap Selling, Sandler, etc.) and I check whether your CRM records any of what that method asks a rep to do. Usually it records none of it, and that is the first finding.
Measure the dead quarter
The stretch between a good demo and a decision, where your champion is writing a business case for people you will never meet. I measure how much of your pipeline is sitting in it, how long it has been there, and what share of it ever comes out.
Run the deal desk
A standing weekly session where every open deal gets inspected against how these institutions actually buy. Who signs. Where they sit in their contract cycle. What the board threshold is and when the board meets. Whether the champion has ever bought anything before.
Keep the record
Every lost deal filed in the same structure, so the reason it died stops being a story somebody tells once and becomes something you can count. After two quarters the pattern is usually obvious and nobody had to guess.
Why the order is fixed.
Counting comes first
Until you know how many of the 8,569 institutions can actually buy what you sell, every pipeline conversation is arguing about the wrong denominator. Quota gets set off a number nobody checked.
The gate comes before the score
A scored assessment of your internal machine is useful. A scored assessment that ignores a structural blocker sitting on forty percent of your committed pipeline is worse than useless, because it aims the fix at the wrong place.
The ongoing work comes last
A weekly deal desk is only worth running once you agree on what qualifies a deal and what the gate is. Start there and you get a meeting instead of a discipline.
Three tools I built, used in every engagement.
These are not products you can buy. They are the instruments I use during the work, and they are the reason the findings are specific to your company rather than general advice.
The Market File
Every bank and credit union in the country in one table, with assets, branches, staff and charter type, pulled from the FDIC and the NCUA and refreshed every quarter.
Used in step one to count how many institutions can actually buy what you sell.
The Gate Map
A record of which condition governs which kind of product. Five product categories, plus four conditions that apply to every institution regardless of what you sell.
Used in step two to work out what has to be true before a deal can close.
The Method Check
You tell it which sales methodology your team was trained on. It lists what that method requires a rep to do, then checks whether your CRM records any of it. If it does not, that is the first finding. Whether it is Sandler, Challenger, SPIN Selling, Miller Heiman, Gap Selling or MEDDPICC, the method is only valuable when it is executed and tracked.
Used in steps three and five to show each rep whether the method is working for them.
Why the Method Check matters more than it sounds
Most companies pay real money to train a team on a sales methodology. Sandler, Challenger, SPIN Selling, Miller Heiman, Gap Selling, MEDDPICC. It does not matter which one you bought. The training happens and then nothing gets measured.
So nobody can say whether reps are using it. Nobody can say whether it worked. The reps who did try it drift off, because no one ever showed them their own numbers got better.
I take whichever method you already bought and make it measurable. If your CRM cannot record the steps, I tell you which fields to add first. Then I show each rep what the method did for their own win rate.
Start anywhere you like. Most people start with the score.
It is free, it takes about ten minutes, and the report back names the gaps rather than selling you something. If it turns out you do not need me, you will know that too.