Sales Ops Readiness Checklist

21 questions that separate businesses with a functioning revenue engine from businesses running on tribal knowledge and good intentions.

Score yourself honestly. Every "no" represents friction between your team and closed revenue. Six or more means the drag is structural, not situational.

Pipeline and Qualification

• Can you pull your top 5 opportunities by weighted value from your CRM in under 60 seconds?
• Do your lifecycle stages have documented exit criteria, or do leads accumulate in "Contacted" until someone notices?
• Is there a defined handoff trigger from marketing-qualified to sales-qualified, with specific criteria both teams agreed to?
• Could a new rep look at your pipeline and understand the current state of business within 10 minutes, without asking anyone?
• Do you actively disqualify leads with a documented reason, or do they just stop responding and sit in the CRM forever?

Quote-to-Cash

• Can a buyer go from verbal commitment to signed and invoiced without someone sending a manual email to finance?
• Are proposals generated from a template with standard structure and pricing, or does every deal get a custom document built from scratch?
• Do you know your average days-to-close broken down by offer type, deal size, or segment?
• Is invoice generation triggered automatically when a deal moves to closed-won, or does someone have to remember to do it?
• Can you distinguish recurring revenue from one-time revenue in your CRM without exporting to a spreadsheet?

CRM Discipline

• If you pulled a pipeline report right now, would it reflect the actual state of deals, or would it require 30 minutes of cleanup first?
• Does every active opportunity have exactly one owner who is accountable for progressing it?
• Do all open deals have a specific, dated next step (not "follow up" or "check in")?
• Is there a standing weekly pipeline review with a consistent format, or does it happen when someone remembers?
• Can you produce a revenue forecast from the CRM alone, without calling reps to verify their numbers?

Enablement and Adoption

• Does every rep use the same stage names and definitions, or has the team developed its own dialect?
• Is there a written onboarding path for new hires that covers your sales process, CRM usage, and deal mechanics within the first two weeks?
• Are your playbooks documented in a location the team actually uses, or do they live in someone's head or a forgotten Google Doc?
• Do you measure process adoption (fields filled, stages updated, activities logged) separately from outcomes (revenue, win rate)?

Feedback and Improvement

• Are closed-lost reasons captured in a structured picklist (not free text) and reviewed at least monthly for patterns?
• Does post-sale feedback from delivery, support, or customer success ever trigger a change in how the sales team qualifies or positions deals?

---

Scoring

Count your "no" answers, then find your band:

0 to 5: Operations are functioning. Your next move is optimization: tightening velocity, improving conversion at specific stages, or building better reporting. A focused sprint on your weakest dimension will compound.

6 to 10: You have specific operational gaps that are costing you time, forecast accuracy, or both. These are the kind of problems that respond well to a targeted advisory session where we isolate the 2 to 3 highest-impact fixes and sequence them.

11 to 15: The drag is systemic. Your team is spending meaningful time working around process gaps instead of selling. A diagnostic will map the root causes, identify which problems are creating downstream failures, and produce a sequenced remediation plan.

16 to 21: You are operating on instinct and individual effort. The good news is that the first operational improvements at this stage produce outsized results. Start with a Rapid Clarity Session to identify the single highest-leverage fix and build from there.

What to do next

If this checklist confirmed problems you already suspected but have not addressed, that is the finding. The distance between knowing what is broken and actually fixing it is where quarters get missed.

Book a call to discuss your results →