Stage is a useful internal indicator, but it rarely maps cleanly to buyer progress. That is why you often see deals moving through stages and then suddenly getting stuck.
What worked for us is explicitly matching internal stages to buyer motion. And the easiest way to sanity-check that is to stop asking “what did you do?” and start asking “what did the buyer do?”
Before reviews, for every active deal, can the rep point to one concrete buyer action since the last check-in?
Examples:
• They introduced legal or procurement
• They shared decision criteria or a real timeline
• They confirmed who the economic buyer is
• They agreed on next steps with a date
If the only update is “we followed up” or “we’re waiting,” nothing actually moved. That doesn’t mean the deal is dead, but it does mean it shouldn’t be treated as progressed.
This keeps things practical, aligns stages with reality, and cuts stage inflation without adding rep-facing friction.
