The moment everything changed wasn’t when we deleted £3.1m of pipeline, it was when we realised we’d stopped selling to customers who looked like our winners.
Three weeks ago, we asked a simple question:
“Which of these deals actually look like our best customers?”
Silence told us everything.
So we went back to first principles:
We pulled our top 20 customers, the ones who stayed, expanded, and delivered real margin.
We studied their triggers, their buying behaviour, their internal politics, their path to value.
Then we held every deal in our pipeline up against that pattern.
Only 27% matched.
The rest were noise, expensive, time-consuming noise.
That’s when we realised this isn’t a pipeline problem.
It's a pattern-recognition problem.
If you can’t see the pattern behind your best customers, you can’t scale them, and you definitely can’t clone them.
Here are the 5 questions that exposed the truth for us:
1. Does this deal look like a customer we’d still love in 3 years?
2. Is there a clear trigger event our best accounts also felt?
3. Do they buy the way our top customers buy?
4. Would we still chase this if the quarter restarted today?
5. If it closed tomorrow, would it expand or churn?
Run these questions today.
By 9AM you’ll know exactly which deals align to your true customer pattern, and which ones are stealing your future.
**Because the real shift isn’t cutting the pipeline.
It’s committing to one rule:
Clone your best customers. Kill the rest.
If you want the exact method we use to decode a customer pattern in 90 days, I can share that too.