1,500

The sales numbers were wrong. Everyone knew it.

Pipeline was overstated. Won/loss reports didn’t reflect reality. Expansion revenue was either invisible or counted in ways that made no sense. Sales managers were making decisions off data nobody trusted.

I went looking for the source.

When a deal expanded mid-contract, reps had two options. Edit the closed won opportunity directly. Or create a $0 placeholder opportunity manually. Both were workarounds. Both corrupted the data. The problem traced back to a finance integration that had been built badly, then copied to a new system without fixing what was wrong the first time.

Nobody had solved it because nobody had followed it back that far.

The fix was simpler than anyone expected. Expansion opportunities were excluded from the finance sync criteria entirely. Reps got a screen Flow that made creating them straightforward, without needing to understand what was happening underneath. The opportunity automatically categorized as an upsell, downsell, flat renewal, or churn. Sales managers got reporting that actually reflected what the team was doing.

Twenty-five reps. Daily workarounds. Roughly 1,500 hours a year spent maintaining a broken process that made the numbers worse every time someone used it.

The fix didn’t just clean up the data. It gave sales leadership something they hadn’t had: numbers they could act on.