Flag stalled deals before the quarter ends

Near the end of a quarter the pipeline tends to look fine. Every deal has an owner, every card has a close date, and the dates are all still ahead. Some of those deals stopped moving weeks ago.

Ask your agent to check them against a written definition of stalled, and to put what it finds somewhere a person can read before deciding anything.

What the agent starts with

One board in Timestripe: Sales pipeline, with the live deals spread across its Qualifying, Discovery, Proposal and Negotiation columns. Every one of them is owned, and every close date is this quarter or next. Nothing on the board looks wrong, which is the reason this is hard to do by eye.

Four of them have stopped, and they have stopped in four different ways:

One had a close date of 3 August that has now passed. Legal is reviewing the data processing terms and has not come back.
One has sat in Proposal for nine weeks. The proposal went out on 12 June, and every week since has been next week.
One was sent a proposal on 28 July and nobody picked it up after a handover.
One had a good discovery call on 2 July, two chasers, and no reply since. Its owner and close date both look perfectly healthy on the card.

Only the first two are visible in the card fields. The other two are only in the notes, and the last one has nothing wrong with it at all except that no human being has spoken to them in six weeks.

The findings go to a second board, Pipeline review, so the pipeline itself is left exactly as it was.

Not set up yet? Connect your AI agent to Timestripe

The prompt

Review the open deals on the "Sales pipeline" board in Timestripe — everything not in Closed Won or Closed Lost.

Flag a deal as stalled if any of these are true: no real activity in 21 days; activity but no stage change in 30 days; the close date has passed or was pushed more than once; or the main contact hasn't replied to the last two messages. The card fields won't tell you all of it — read the notes.

Create a goal per stalled deal in the Review queue on "Pipeline review", named for the deal. In each: the annual value, how long since real contact, what is blocking it, and two ways to re-engage. Order them by value at risk, largest first.

The four conditions are what turns a judgement call into something repeatable. Without them, "stalled" means whatever the agent decides it means that day, and the list is different every time you ask.

What comes back

Four goals in the review queue, largest value first: £10,500, £8,200, £5,400, £4,500.

Each one holds the same four things — the value, how long since a real reply, what is blocking it, and two specific ways back in. The order matters more than it looks: a sales lead reading top to bottom is reading in order of what is actually at risk.

Nothing was sent. No email client opened, no draft written, nobody contacted. The agent produced the list; the sales lead decides who to call.

August 18