Celebrate a Smaller, More Focused Sales Pipeline

Your pipeline just shrank 15%. Congratulations!

Pop the champagne.

If your comp plan shifted to reward ICP fit over volume, that decline is the best signal you'll get.

Here's what a smaller pipeline means:

• Sales stopped chasing bad-fit logos to hit activity metrics.
• Marketing killed the vanity channels.
• The team is focused on deals that close and expand.

But most PE operators see the dip and panic.

They reverse course.

They loosen the ICP definition.

They add "bridge deals" to hit the number.

Six months later, the CRM is a mess again.

And here's the real danger: We recently worked with a client who discovered their FY26 gap is 3x larger than projected.

Why?

• Deals that were never properly qualified against ICP.
• Churning customers who "delayed their offboarding."
• Non-recurring revenue this year is masking what won't be there in Q1.

The revenue was real. The foundation was sand.

The time to act is now.

The counterintuitive move? Reward the decline.

Celebrate the pipeline getting smaller if it's getting better.

Recognise the rep who walked from a bad deal.

Bonus the marketer who killed the noise.

Better yet: Incentivise cloning your best customers.

Not "who closed the biggest deal."

Not "who hit 120% of activity quota."

Who brought in another customer that looks like your top 10% by retention, expansion, and margin?

That's the behaviour that builds enterprise value. Enterprise value is built on better.

If your incentives reward precision, trust the dip.

The quality you're building now is what buyers pay multiples for at an exit.

Don't wait until you're staring at a 3x gap in January.