Guide · 13 July 2026 · 4 min read
Pursuits rarely die, they drift
Few opportunities are lost in a decisive moment. Most fade through weeks of nobody quite owning the next move.
Post-mortems love a dramatic cause: price, politics, a rival's relationship. The duller truth is that many losses are abandonments. The client asked a question that waited nine days for an answer. The follow-up after the workshop never happened. No one decided to lose; everyone was busy, and the pursuit starved.
Drift has observable symptoms
A pursuit is drifting when it has no next action with an owner and a date, when its stage has not changed inside its normal cycle time, or when the last meaningful client contact is older than the deal rhythm justifies. None of this requires judgement to detect; it is arithmetic on fields you already hold, if you hold them.
- No next action: the single most predictive warning, and the easiest to fix
- Stage age beyond the median for that stage: something is stuck, name it
- Contact recency fading while the deadline approaches: attention has moved
- Owner overloaded: five drifting pursuits usually share one diary
Make drift loud
The countermeasure is visibility with mild social pressure: a ranked list of drifting pursuits, by fee value, on the screen everyone starts the week with. Not a report someone can decline to run, a default. Most drift ends the moment it is named, because the fix is usually one email that takes four minutes.