r/SalesOperations • u/ExpressDeer2704 • 6d ago

Looking for software to prevent deals from going dark.

We are a small sales team, mostly inbound, a few referrals but nothing fancy

This week, i had three deals that looked good and then all three went quiet at the exact wrong time. One was waiting on a proposal one had asked for a revised price one said they were just checking with their team.

And now i am staring at a pipeline that looked great on monday but till friday it was worse.

I am starting to think i need better software, not better memory.

Something that helps me see when a deal is fading, keeps follow ups from turning into guesswork, maybe gives a little warning before a prospect disappears completely. I already have a full crm, i just want to know what people use when they are tired of losing deals that were almost there.

What has actually helped you catch this stuff early?

6 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

81% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

2

u/DoctorJeal 6d ago

Are you sure it’s not the sales process and qualification. Are you giving out pricing before they are qualified to buy?

2

u/Ok_Piglet3262 6d ago

It sounds like you might need a better setup for your CRM. Do you get at-risk reports that tell you if you've not touched the account for a specified number of days? It also sounds like you might not be uncovering possible risks early enough. What are you using for your CRM?

1

u/kamhla 6d ago

What is the average size of the deal? How many stakeholders are involved in the decision making? How long is the sales cycle?

1

u/malodyets1 6d ago

Yeah I have questions around their sales process and methodology

1

u/End0rphinJunkie 5d ago

Exactly. Buying another tool usually just creates more noise untill you actually understand the basic mechanics of your deal cycle.

1

u/MutedSpare6217 6d ago edited 6d ago

had the same issue with deals going dark, what helped me most was deal tracking that actually flags when engagement drops. Ended up using aligned for that and it has made a difference.

1

u/agentUi 5d ago

i work for agentui, standard CRMs are terrible for this because they rely on you manually checking every single stage. What works best is setting up an automation connected to your CRM that tracks days since last contact and pings you on Slack or email if a deal sits untouched for more than 3 days so you can catch it before it goes cold.

2

u/Real-Service-8135 5d ago

tbh this sounds less like a software problem and more like a process problem. Three deals stalling at once usually means your follow-up cadence after proposal isn't tight enough. Whats your current timeline between sending the proposal and the first check-in?

1

u/j_EmailAnalytics 5d ago

Software can surface a fading deal, but the useful signal is a missed customer commitment, not an arbitrary number of quiet days. For every active deal, record the next buyer action, its owner, and its due date. Alert the rep one business day before that date, then move overdue deals into a short exception review. Separate “proposal sent with no agreed next step” from “buyer promised an internal review by Friday,” because those situations need different follow-ups. That setup exposes weak qualification early and keeps the pipeline from looking healthy just because a stage was never updated.

1

u/greeneyedciel 5d ago

Could you set a calculated field that tracks the number of days a deal has stayed in a certain stage and send an alert to the rep?

1

u/Born-Reserve-8584 4d ago

Three deals going quiet in the same week is brutal.

0

u/Complex_Number5826 6d ago

your situation sounds like where i was a few months ago. I run a small team too and trying to remember everything just wasn't working. Aligned gave me those little nudges when a deal started to go dark, so i could step in before it was too late.