#The challenge
A newly hired revenue-operations leader inherited a Salesforce instance the executive team could not trust. Reps were parking large 'standby' opportunities in the earliest stage, inflating pipeline with deals one leader described as more pipe dream than pipeline. Blank commercial-model fields, missing lead sources and duplicate accounts blocked clean attribution, and finance and marketing leadership wanted one place to see where the business was actually winning. LeanScale was brought in to redesign the sales lifecycle, enforce it in the CRM, and clean the data underneath it.
#The approach
Lifecycle redesign on observed behavior, not assumptions
Rebuilt the end-to-end sales lifecycle into a single consolidated Salesforce SOP, re-deriving stage conversion and close rates from a locked 24-month cohort of roughly 1,650 opportunities and about 4,000 stage transitions — so the funnel described what reps actually did rather than what the process assumed.
Stage gating specced and stood up in production
Specced roughly 15 gating fields and 8 strategic validation rules and stood them up in production for both new-business and expansion record types, forcing qualification data to be captured before a deal could advance. LeanScale wrote the spec; the customer's own admin built to it, which kept the enforcement layer maintainable in-house.
Closing the sync loophole behind the gates
Documented the HubSpot–Salesforce bidirectional sync and set the marketing platform's deal fields to defer to the CRM, so an inbound sync could no longer overwrite gated fields and quietly un-gate a deal that had never met the criteria.
Backfilling the field the gates depend on
Backfilled the commercial-model field across open opportunities, taking it from blank on nearly all of roughly 650 open records down to fewer than 20 remaining — and those on record types that were out of scope.
Forecasting, enablement and renewal playbooks
Delivered a stage-based forecasting specification aligned to the new gates, a six-section sales-enablement framework, and a renewal-and-expansion lifecycle playbook for the in-house team to train reps against, so the gates arrived with the training to support them.
Executive reporting on a bow-tie model
Connected a BI layer to Salesforce to give leadership deal-velocity reporting on a bow-tie funnel model, answering the executive ask for a single place to see where the business was winning.
#Outcomes
Stage gating live in production
Roughly 15 gating fields and 8 strategic validation rules went live for new-business and expansion opportunities inside the engagement window, verified against a live production validation-rule pull rather than a status report.
Lifecycle grounded in two years of real data
The lifecycle SOP and forecast categories were re-derived on a locked 24-month cohort of roughly 1,650 opportunities and about 4,000 stage transitions, replacing assumed conversion rates.
Opportunity data backfilled from near-empty to near-complete
The commercial-model field went from blank on nearly all of roughly 650 open opportunities to fewer than 20 blank, all of those on out-of-scope record types.
One executive view of the funnel
A BI layer connected to Salesforce gave leadership deal-velocity reporting in a single place instead of reconciling exports.