Minimum Hygiene Standards

Hygiene standards are not aspirational guidelines that live in a wiki nobody reads. They are enforced rules built into your CRM, your workflows, and your team habits. The minimum standards below are non-negotiable — not because they are ideal, but because anything less makes your pipeline data unreliable for analysis.

1. Required Fields on Every Deal Deal name, company, amount, close date, stage, and owner. These six fields are the minimum data needed to calculate pipeline value, conversion rates, velocity, and coverage. Make them mandatory in the CRM — not optional, not "encouraged," mandatory.
2. Stage Change Timestamps Every time a deal changes stage, record the date automatically. This enables velocity analysis — how long deals spend in each stage — which is the diagnostic tool that finds process bottlenecks. Most CRMs log this natively. If yours does not, build it.
3. Close Date Discipline Close dates must reflect the buyer's expected decision date, not the rep's hope. Push dates forward when the buyer's timeline changes. Never leave a close date in the past on an open deal — it tells the system the deal should have closed already and distorts every time-based report.
4. Weekly Pipeline Review A standing 30-minute meeting where every deal in Proposal or later is reviewed for accuracy. Is the amount current? Is the stage correct? Is the close date realistic? Weekly reviews catch drift before it compounds. Skip them, and the pipeline decays within two weeks.