Meeting qualification pipeline

The problem

SDR comp relied on lifecycle stage changes. Lifecycle stages should never move backwards in the CRM, so recycled contacts couldn’t be tracked for comp. There was also no single place to track meetings from every source, or to trace a closed deal back to the meeting that started it.

What I built

A separate pre-sales deal pipeline with seven stages: Meeting Booked, Meeting Completed, Opportunity Created, then Closed Won, Closed Lost, Disqualified or No-Show.

It tracks every meeting the same way, whatever the source: SDR outbound, executive outreach, conferences, inbound and partner referrals. Custom properties capture the meeting date, the source, whether the contact was recycled, and the SDR owner.

A deal-linker workflow runs every four hours on weekdays. It finds early-stage sales deals with no link, gets the associated contact, checks for a matching pre-sales deal through that contact, and creates a deal-to-deal association. It also sets a property with the linked deal’s ID.

Design decisions

• A separate pipeline instead of reusing lifecycle stages. Lifecycle stages are one-way, and forcing them backwards corrupts the data.
• Real associations through the v4 API, plus a property. Reps get a clickable link and reports get a field to query.
• Source-agnostic tracking, so every meeting source can be compared on close rate.
• Scheduled linking, so reps don’t have to connect deals by hand.

Result

SDR comp on recycled contacts became accurate. Closed deals traced back to the originating meeting. For the first time we could compare conversion rates across every meeting source.