The Evidence Ladder / Framework 02
Every stage, every ramp checkpoint and every forecast call should rest on something a buyer did. Not on something a seller felt about it.
The whole framework: the rungs, the rewrite worksheet, the four failure modes. Take it and use it.
FIG. 01
REPORTED vs PROVABLE
Same pipeline, counted twice. Once on what reps feel, once on what buyers actually did.
Ask a rep why a deal is in stage three and you will usually get a sentence about the buyer's enthusiasm. The call went great. They love it. Procurement is just a formality.
None of that is evidence. It is a seller's interpretation of a buyer's politeness, and it is the single most common reason a forecast misses by thirty percent with no warning.
The fix is not better judgment. It is refusing to let judgment into the field at all. A stage should advance when the buyer does something that costs them something. Everything else is a note, not a stage.
THE TEST
Could a stranger reading your CRM verify this without talking to the rep?
If yes, it is evidence. If no, it is a feeling with a timestamp. That one question will let you audit your entire pipeline in an afternoon.
Each rung costs the buyer more than the one below it. That is the entire logic. A deal is only as far along as the highest rung you can prove, and the rung below has to be true too. No skipping.
Most pipelines are full of rung one and reported as rung four. The gap between those two is the entire forecast miss.
SIGNED, BUDGET MOVED
A signature, a PO, a budget line reallocated. The only rung that is unambiguous, and the reason it sits at the top is that everything below it can still fall through.
Artifact in the record: countersigned agreement or PO number.
INTERNAL RISK TAKEN
Your champion presented your business case to their boss, or brought you into a room with the person who signs. They have now attached their own name to this working out.
Artifact in the record: the deck they presented, or a calendar invite with an executive on it that they sent.
WORK DONE ON THEIR SIDE
They pulled their own data for a pilot, filled in your security questionnaire, wrote requirements, or got their IT team on a call. Work is the cheapest reliable signal you can get.
Artifact in the record: the file they sent you, or the completed document.
OTHER PEOPLE BROUGHT IN
A second or third stakeholder joined, and your contact was the one who invited them. Introducing a vendor to a colleague is a small reputational bet, which is what makes it real.
Artifact in the record: named attendees on an invite they forwarded, not names they mentioned.
A MEETING THEY SCHEDULED
The bottom rung, and the one most teams overweight. Time is cheap, and a buyer will give you forty five minutes out of curiosity or politeness. Useful as a start, worthless as a forecast input.
Artifact in the record: an accepted invite for a second meeting, booked before the first one ended.
A deal sitting at rung one for six weeks is not a late stage deal with a slow buyer. It is a rung one deal that somebody moved for you.
Four columns, one row per stage. Do this on paper with your sales leader in the room, not alone in a spreadsheet. The argument you have while filling it in is most of the value.
SCROLL THE TABLE SIDEWAYS ON A PHONE
Five stages is usually right. If you have eight, two of them are the same stage with different moods, and one of them exists because somebody wanted a dashboard.
I have caused three of these myself. They are predictable enough that you can watch for them from week one.
FAILURE 01
If logging evidence takes a rep more than fifteen seconds, they will stop, and you will be back to feelings inside a month. Attach it to something they already do rather than adding a field.
FAILURE 02
The first time a leader moves a deal up because they have a good feeling about it, the whole system becomes decorative. If you want an exception, log it as an exception and count them.
FAILURE 03
Week one of honest scoring always looks like a disaster. It is not. You are seeing the real number for the first time. Tell your board before you run it, not after.
FAILURE 04
The ladder describes reality, it does not create it. A rep chasing an artifact to advance a stage is doing paperwork. The artifact is the symptom of progress, never the cause.
Nothing held back for a paid version. If you run the rewrite yourself and your forecast gets more honest, that was the point.
If you would rather not spend the next six weeks arguing about stage definitions, that is the part I do.