Sales discovery with a live map: a CRM vendor's call

Ae: Before we get going — quick housekeeping. I'm recording this so I'm not scribbling, and I've got Sapeum open on my side. As you walk me through how things run today, it maps your process live on screen — I'll see the steps build as you describe them. That alright?

Vp: Yeah, that's fine. Fair warning, "process" is a generous word for what we do, but go for it.

Ae: Most useful kind of call. So — how does your team manage leads and the pipeline today, without a CRM, and where's it painful?

Vp: Leads come at us from a bunch of directions, and that's the first headache. A web form drops into a shared inbox a few of us watch. Events come back weeks later as a spreadsheet of attendees. Referrals are forwarded emails. And the reps run their own outbound on top.

Ae: Is there one place all those end up?

Vp: A master Google Sheet. Our SDR or ops person copies every new lead in by hand — name, company, email, source. Event lists we bulk-paste; the rest, typed one at a time.

Ae: And how does a lead get to a rep?

Vp: We hand them out. Informal round-robin — whoever's next up, or by territory, or whoever grabbed it first.

Ae: Then what's the rep do with it?

Vp: They qualify it — budget, right size, do they have the problem we solve. And there's no shared definition. Each rep decides what counts; "qualified" means five different things depending who you ask. Then, once it's real, the rep moves it into their own spreadsheet — their columns, their stage names. So the master sheet and the rep's sheet drift apart almost immediately.

Ae: And follow-ups — the "circle back next Tuesday" stuff — how does a rep track that?

Vp: Calendar reminders, mostly. Some flag the email in their inbox. One of my best reps runs half his pipeline off sticky notes.

Ae: And when a follow-up isn't written down anywhere?

Vp: It slips. If the reminder gets set, it happens. If it doesn't, the deal goes quiet and nobody notices for weeks. That's probably our biggest leak — winnable stuff stalling because nobody circled back.

Ae: Does the path look the same for every deal, or does it branch?

Vp: It branches. Inbound's fast — they came to us, warm. Outbound's a longer grind. And there's a size split: SMB's quick, one person decides. Enterprise is a different animal, long cycle, five or six stakeholders — keeping those threads straight is the hard part, it's all in the rep's email, no shared view. And the quote's a Word doc or PDF off a template, priced by hand — weird discount, they ping me on Slack for a quick okay.

Ae: Let me back up — you said your SDR copies leads into the master sheet. Still true?

Vp: So — actually, let me correct that, I was describing how it ran a year ago. The SDR doesn't catch the web-form ones anymore. Those sit in the shared inbox and whoever grabs it first works it from there — never makes it into the master sheet at all. So that sheet's more incomplete than I let on.

Ae: Important detail, thanks. So how do you, as VP, get a read on the whole pipeline?

Vp: Two ways. A weekly meeting — Monday, everyone reads their deals off their own sheet. And then I build the forecast, which means copy-pasting every rep's sheet into one master tab and trying to make the numbers line up. They don't — different stage names, different date formats, somebody hasn't updated since Tuesday. The forecast's more of an educated guess than a number I'd bet on.

Ae: I want to press on that — it sounds like the expensive part. Where do the most time, or the most deals, get lost?

Vp: The time sink is the forecast and the double entry. But the deals lost — that's the follow-ups slipping. And the one that scares me: when a rep leaves.

Ae: Say more. When a rep leaves, what happens to their deals?

Vp: Their pipeline's in their personal sheet and their inbox. When they walk, it walks with them. A guy left in Q3 and we spent a month reconstructing what he had going — half-finished deals we didn't even know existed. Some we just lost. Deals walking out the door.

Ae: That's a serious gap. And when a deal closes — how does it hand off to onboarding?

Vp: Email. Rep writes up the account, sends it to implementation. But the context — what we promised, why they bought — is in the rep's head, so onboarding comes back and re-asks half of it.

Ae: And reporting — win rates, which lead sources work?

Vp: Stitched together by hand when leadership asks. Always a little stale, and I never fully trust it.

Ae: Let me go back — you said Monday's meeting is everyone reading off their own sheets. Is that the whole review?

Vp: Actually — let me walk that back. It's not just reading off sheets anymore. A couple months ago I started making everyone update a shared tab the night before, so we're at least on one screen. About two-thirds actually do it. So it's not as chaotic as I made it sound — but it only holds because I'm nagging people every Sunday.

Ae: Good clarification. Last question, my favorite — what do people get wrong about running sales this way? The non-obvious thing.

Vp: People assume the problem's the data entry — the typing, the copy-paste. Everyone fixates on that because it's annoying and you can see it. But that's not what's killing us. The real cost is invisible: the deals that quietly die because nobody followed up, and the pipeline that vanishes when a rep leaves. You never see those on a spreadsheet — they were never really on it. It's not the busywork, it's the stuff that leaks out the bottom.

Ae: That's exactly the part I wanted to get to — great place to land. Really helpful, thanks for walking me through it.

Vp: Yeah — seeing it laid out on your screen, the leaky spots are pretty obvious. Bit uncomfortable, honestly.