Your pipeline is a feeling

Ask a founder how sales are going and you will get an adjective. Good. Slow. Picking up. Ask which deals close this month and you get a pause, then a name, then a story about why that one is different.

The adjective is a feeling. The feeling is generated almost entirely by the most recent conversation you had, which is why sales feels good on Thursday afternoon and catastrophic on Monday morning without anything having changed.

What the feeling is made of

Three things drive it, and none of them is revenue.

The first is recency. A warm call an hour ago outweighs four weeks of silence from someone bigger. The second is politeness. People are nice to founders, and "this looks great, let me run it by the team" reads as progress when it is usually a decline with better manners. The third is sunk cost: the longer you have worked a deal, the more real it feels, which is precisely backwards.

Put those together and you get a systematic bias. Your sense of your pipeline is weighted toward deals that are old, friendly, and going nowhere.

The test

Here is the whole thing in one question: for each deal, who signs it?

Not who likes it. Not who you talk to. Whose name goes on the contract, and have they said a number out loud.

Most founders cannot answer this for most of their pipeline, and the deals where they cannot are almost always the ones they feel best about. The champion is friendly because nothing is at stake for them. Nobody has said no because nobody with the authority to say no has been asked.

A deal where you do not know who signs is not a late-stage deal. It is a

conversation you have been enjoying.

What to do about it

Ask. Today, on the deal you feel best about. "Who else needs to be comfortable with this before it can go ahead?" is not rude, it is the most basic professional question in the transaction, and the answer is worth more than another month of follow-up.

You will lose deals doing this. That is the point — you will lose them in August instead of December, and August you can still do something about.