Strategy · Operations · Design
While building a deal registration performance dashboard for the partner sales organization, I uncovered ~300 partner-submitted leads sitting untouched in Salesforce — some were over six months old. The company had a 48-hour SLA for direct sellers to accept or reject inbound deal registrations. Nobody was doing either.
At their average deal size, that was roughly $4.5M in partner-sourced pipeline going nowhere.
Money, left on the table. Partners, left in the dark. A sales org., not honoring a core partner agreement — the 48-hour SLA that underpins trust in any deal registration program.
The company had a clear policy: when a partner submits a deal registration, the direct sales rep either accepts it and converts it to an opportunity, or rejects it — either way, the partner knows where they stand and that their effort is being taken seriously.
That process had broken down entirely. Leads weren't being accepted or rejected — they were being ignored. More importantly, pipeline-generating partners were being ignored. No report existed to surface the gap, so nobody in leadership knew it was happening.
Immediate accountability was needed, so I designed, built, and implemented reports to surface the problem with zero ambiguity.
The first segmented every unactioned deal registration by direct sales rep and age bracket — under a week, under 30 days, under 60, under 90, and over 90. Sorted worst to best, color-coded red past 30 days. Every rep, their manager, their geo leader — all the way up to the CRO — could see exactly where the failures were.
The second report mirrored the same structure on the partner sales side — giving Channel Leadership visibility into which Partner Sales Managers had the most deal registrations languishing on their watch.
I presented both reports to the CRO with a simple framing: these are potential deals from our partners, we have a 48-hour policy nobody is following, and we're leaving up to $4.5M on the table. It was the first item the CRO mentioned on the next company-wide weekly sales call — and he referred to it at every call for the next three weeks.
The response was immediate. By the next week, over half the backlog was cleared. By week two, another half of what remained was resolved. Within a month, 25% of the original leads had been either converted into new opportunities or merged into existing deals — giving the company accurate partner attribution it previously lacked.
The reports became a standing item on the CRO and Partner Chief's weekly cadence — a permanent check on whether the sales organization was honoring its commitments to the partner ecosystem. By the following quarter, deal registrations were no longer languishing.
The problem wasn't just patched — it stopped recurring.