The 3 Things I Audit in Every Sales Org Before I Touch Anything Else

When someone brings me into a sales org, there's usually a presenting symptom. Pipeline is soft. Reps aren't hitting quota. The forecast is a work of fiction. New hires keep washing out. The CEO is frustrated. The VP of Sales is defensive. Everyone has a theory about what's broken.

I've learned to ignore all of it. At least for the first few days.

Not because those problems aren't real. They are. But they're symptoms, not root causes. And if you start fixing symptoms, you end up rearranging furniture in a house with a cracked foundation.

After building five revenue organizations from scratch and diagnosing dozens more, I've found that the real story lives in three places. These are the three things I look at before I form an opinion, make a recommendation, or touch anything.

1. How Deals Actually Move (Not How the CRM Says They Move)

The first thing I want to understand is the real sales process. Not the one on the slide deck. Not the stages someone named in the CRM two years ago. The actual path a deal takes from first conversation to closed-won.

Here's how I find it. I pull 10 to 15 closed-won deals from the last two quarters and reconstruct the timeline. When did the first touch happen? How did discovery go? When did a proposal land? How many stakeholders got involved? What almost killed it?

Then I do the same thing with 10 to 15 closed-lost deals.

What I'm looking for is the gap between the documented process and the lived process. In almost every org I've audited, there's a significant disconnect. The CRM says the deal was in "discovery" for two weeks, but the rep actually had three calls and a demo in that window. The CRM says "proposal sent" is a stage, but nobody tracks whether the proposal was reviewed, discussed, or forwarded to a decision maker.

This matters because you can't coach to a process that doesn't reflect reality. You can't forecast accurately if your stages don't map to actual buyer behavior. And you can't onboard new reps if the playbook describes a journey that no deal actually follows.

The fix isn't complicated. But it requires sitting with the data and the reps, not just the leadership team. Leadership will tell you what the process should be. Reps will tell you what it actually is. The truth is usually somewhere in between, and that's where the real playbook starts.

2. What Reps Do in the First 30 Minutes of Their Day

This one surprises people. But it's the fastest diagnostic I know.

If I can shadow a rep or simply ask them to walk me through their morning routine, I'll learn more about the health of the org in 30 minutes than I will from any dashboard. Here's why.

A rep who opens the CRM first, checks their pipeline, reviews their tasks, and starts executing against a plan is operating inside a system. They have structure. They know what "good" looks like for the day.

A rep who opens their inbox first, reacts to whatever landed overnight, jumps between Slack threads, and eventually gets around to making calls is surviving, not selling. They're in reactive mode because nobody has given them a proactive framework.

This tells me everything about enablement, management, and coaching in one snapshot. If reps are winging their mornings, it means nobody has defined what a productive sales day looks like. It means their manager isn't running daily or weekly accountability rhythms. It means enablement is focused on product training and ignoring workflow.

I saw this pattern at a physical security company where the reps were talented and the product was strong, but pipeline generation was inconsistent. The issue wasn't effort. It was structure. Nobody had ever mapped out what a week should look like for a rep at their deal size and sales cycle length. Once we built that framework and the manager started coaching to it, pipeline generation went up 40% in a quarter. Same reps. Same product. Different system.

The people are almost never the problem. The system around them is.

3. How the Forecast Gets Built

The third thing I audit is the forecasting process, because it reveals the quality of every conversation happening between reps and managers.

In a healthy org, the forecast is the output of rigorous deal inspection. The manager has reviewed each opportunity with the rep. They've pressure-tested the close date, the decision-making process, the competitive landscape, and the next steps. The forecast reflects shared conviction, not wishful thinking.

In an unhealthy org, the forecast is a spreadsheet exercise. The manager asks each rep for a number. The rep gives a number based on gut feel and optimism. The manager rolls it up, maybe haircuts it by 10 or 15%, and sends it to the CEO. Nobody has actually inspected the deals underneath.

Here's the tell. Ask a rep about their top three deals. If they can walk you through the decision-making process, name the economic buyer, describe the competitive situation, and articulate what needs to happen next with specific dates and actions, they're being coached. If they give you a company name and an amount and say "it's looking good," they're not.

The forecasting conversation is the most important coaching moment in the sales week. If it's happening as a real inspection, the org is getting better every week. If it's happening as a reporting exercise, it's just administrative overhead that helps no one.

I've seen this play out across SaaS, distribution, and OEM sales environments. The industry doesn't matter. The deal size doesn't matter. The principle is the same. The quality of your forecast is a direct reflection of the quality of your coaching.

Why These Three, and Why First

These three audits give me a complete picture of the operating system underneath the sales org.

Process tells me whether the machine is designed correctly. Daily behavior tells me whether the people inside the machine know how to operate it. Forecasting tells me whether management is actually managing or just collecting numbers.

Everything else flows from here. Comp plans, hiring profiles, tech stack decisions, territory design, enablement priorities. All of those conversations get sharper once you understand the foundation.

When I start fixing things, I start where the gap is biggest. Sometimes that's a process redesign. Sometimes it's building a coaching cadence from scratch. Sometimes it's as simple as defining what a qualified opportunity actually looks like so reps and managers are speaking the same language.

But I never start with the fix. I start with these three questions. Every time.

Try It Yourself

You don't need an outside consultant to run this diagnostic. Pull 10 closed-won and 10 closed-lost deals and compare them to your CRM stages. Ask your reps what they do first thing in the morning. Sit in on a forecast call and listen for whether deals are being inspected or reported.

If what you find makes you uncomfortable, that's a good sign. It means you're seeing clearly.