Observability, not Sales Reps
“Hope is not a strategy” is the title of a sales book from 2001. Hope is also not a process. If you can’t answer “what happened to this lead or opportunity?” in 20 seconds, you don’t have a process. You have hope.
Most operational mysteries are only mysteries because visibility is lacking.
In my 20-year sales career, I’ve seen this a lot:
A lead comes in. Someone (yes, sometimes this was me) intends to follow up later. A rep gets pulled into meetings, onsite work, a proposal, a service escalation, or just the normal chaos of the week. The follow-up happens. Or maybe it doesn’t. Days turn into weeks, and the opportunity quietly dies.
Then months later, someone asks the painful question: “Did we ever get back to them?”
And now you’re doing archaeology, checking inboxes, scrolling CRM notes, searching Slack, asking three different people what they remember, and still not being sure what’s true.
This is why teams think they need better discipline. But discipline doesn’t hold up under the fire drills of the week. What you need instead is structural visibility.
The fix is rarely a big platform. It’s usually a few simple pieces of observability:
1. A clear status at each stage (New, Working, Waiting, Won, Lost)
2. A timestamp on the last meaningful action (LastTouchedAt, NextStepAt)
3. One place where the truth lives (not five tools and a whiteboard)
4. Make it automatic (the thing that avoids the fire drills)
With observability built into the workflow, you can trigger follow-ups, reminders, and handoffs without creating chaos, because you can always see what happened and why.
Two rules managers repeat for a reason:
* If it isn’t recorded, it didn’t happen.
* If it can’t be seen, it can’t be improved.
Sales reps hate hearing these when they’re used as a stick. The better approach is to build the system so the “CRM work” pays the rep back.
If you’re constantly asking “Did anyone respond?” or “Where did this go?” it’s probably not a lazy sales rep problem. It’s an observability problem.
And once you solve observability, speed and scale get much easier.
Join the discussion at LinkedIn.