How to
How to stop deals slipping to next quarter.
Deals that slip are rarely a surprise on the last day of the quarter. The signals appear weeks earlier: a close date that moves, a buying process step that has not started, and a champion who has stopped replying quickly.
Slippage is a forecast problem before it is a deal problem.
A deal that slips was in a forecast it should not have been in. The deal did not change; the confidence was wrong from the start.
The three early signals.
The close date moved once. Most CRMs record the new date and forget the old one, so nobody counts this. A date that has moved twice will usually move again.
A required buying process step has not started. If procurement takes three weeks at this company and there are two weeks left, the deal is already next quarter, whatever anybody says.
Reply speed dropped. A thread that went from same day to five days is a deal losing internal priority.
What to do about it.
Work backwards from the close date through the steps the buyer still has to complete, and check the arithmetic. Most slipped deals fail this test weeks in advance and nobody ran it.
Then have the conversation early. A date moved deliberately in week four is a plan. A date moved in the last week is a surprise.
Counting it.
Kaypo counts how many times a close date has moved later and treats that as a signal in its own right, because a CRM stores the date rather than the history of it.
Questions
Why do sales deals slip?
Usually because a required step on the buyer side had not started in time, or the deal lost internal priority. Both are visible weeks before the quarter ends.
How do you predict which deals will slip?
Watch for close dates that have already moved, buying process steps that have not started with insufficient time remaining, and reply times getting longer.
It arrives in Slack
Every morning, each rep gets one message naming the deals on their own book that moved overnight, biggest mover first, with the reason beside each number and the deals that have gone quiet underneath.
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Related reading
How to tell if a deal is stalled, and whether to keep working it
A stalled deal that is getting better and a stalled deal that is dying look identical in a CRM. How to tell them apart.
Why your forecast is wrong, and the query that shows by how much
Most forecasts multiply deal value by a stage probability nobody has checked. Here is the gap between that number and the actual win rate.
Why deals go quiet, and what to do about it
A deal going silent almost never means what a rep hopes it means. What the silence usually is, and how to tell the difference early.
Why go to market engineering appeared when it did
The title barely existed three years ago. Three specific changes created it, and understanding them tells you whether you need one.
Reviewed September 20, 2026 against the product as it behaves today.