The 15-minute sales health check: 10 questions every founder should be able to answer

You don't need a consultant to know whether your sales function is in trouble. You need ten honest answers and about fifteen minutes.

Open your CRM. Set a timer. Give yourself one point for every question you can answer "yes" to without guessing. If you'd have to go and ask someone, that's a "no".

The ten questions

1. Can you say your total open pipeline value in under a minute?
2. Is that pipeline at least three times your target for the period? (Rule of thumb: 3x to 4x is healthy. Under 2x is a warning.)
3. Does every open deal have a next step with a date on it?
4. Can you name your top three reasons for losing deals last quarter, from data and not from memory?
5. Do you know your win rate on qualified deals, not on all leads?
6. Did last quarter's forecast land within 15 percent of what actually closed?
7. Could each rep tell you their number for this month without opening anything?
8. Do you know how long your last hire took to become fully productive?
9. Does your commission plan pay more for the deals you actually want, like healthy margin and new clients?
10. Could the business close a normal month if you were offline for two weeks?

What your score says

• 8 to 10: Solid base. Your problems are specific, and specific problems are fixable.
• 5 to 7: You're running on instinct. It works until it doesn't. This is where growth usually stalls.
• 0 to 4: You're running on hope. That's not an insult, it's how most founder-led companies start. The first fixes are also the cheapest.

What each "no" usually means

• Questions 1 to 3: pipeline hygiene. Stages aren't defined and nobody owns the next step. A weekly pipeline review fixes most of this on its own.
• Questions 4 to 6: no feedback loop. You're closing and losing deals but not learning from either. Start tracking the handful of numbers that actually predict revenue.
• Questions 7 and 8: no management rhythm and no onboarding. Reps are guessing what good looks like.
• Question 9: your pay plan is steering behaviour you don't want. See how to design a commission structure that works.
• Question 10: you are the system. Every fix above is really about getting you out of the middle of it.

The step most people skip

Hand this list to your sales lead, or your most senior rep, and ask them to score it on their own without seeing your answers. Then compare.

If you scored question 7 a "yes" and your reps scored it a "no", you've just found a gap in how targets are communicated. That conversation is worth more than the score itself.

Scored under seven? The next step isn't more headcount. It's a proper look at where the pipeline, the process and the people are leaking. That's what an audit is for.