Pipeline that didn't exist

The global head of sales knew what the strategy should be. The system just wasn’t built to support it.

Good question. I went looking for the answer.

Contract expiration dates weren’t in Salesforce. They weren’t really anywhere actionable. Some lived in the finance system. Some in spreadsheets. Some in someone’s memory. Reps had no visibility into what was coming up, so renewals happened by accident or not at all.

The sales team was missing quota. Their primary directive was to grow existing accounts. The opportunity was sitting right in front of them and the system made it invisible.

The fix wasn’t complicated. I activated the standard Salesforce contract object and built automation to populate it from the closed won opportunity. Expiration dates now existed in the system. Alerts fired at 180 days and 90 days. Reps knew what was coming.

Then I went a layer deeper. One product per opportunity had been a hard limitation due to a finance integration constraint. That meant no one really knew what a customer owned. I rebuilt product tracking at the line item level and created assets on the account record when deals closed. Now a rep could look at an account and see exactly what the customer had, what they didn’t have, and when everything expired.

The pipeline didn’t just get more visible. It got bigger.