revenue-leakage

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---
name: revenue-leakage
description: Trace where deals and revenue silently exit one specific funnel and size the loss in recoverable (never gross) dollars - untracked steps, unworked leads, manual handoffs, mid-funnel stalls, paper-process drops, billing and renewal misses - separating real leaks from healthy disqualification and data-capture gaps. Use whenever the user mentions revenue leakage, funnel drop-off, a leaky funnel, deals disappearing, unworked leads, handoff gaps, "where are we losing deals", or "why did pipeline vanish" - even if they never say "leakage". Covers B2B sales-led and B2C/self-serve/PLG, one funnel instance at a time. Takes stage definitions as given - to audit those, use mbfinotti/revops-skills@pipeline-stage-definition-audit instead.
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: Maya-Beth Finotti
  version: "1.4.2"
---

# Revenue Leakage

Trace where records and dollars silently exit one specific funnel instance, prove each loss is real, size the recoverable amount, and rank the fixes by owner.

- **Lifecycle lens:** Winning by Design's Bowtie (winningbydesign.com/bowtie). Leakage spans acquisition through onboarding, renewal, and expansion, not just the sales stages - most teams over-inspect the top and never reconcile the back half.
- **Late-stage leak:** MEDDPICC's "Paper Process" element (meddicc.com/meddpicc) names the classic late-stage leak - deals that die between verbal yes and signature.
- **Working method:** process mining applied to the funnel's own event log, the approach Celonis popularized. Reconstruct the process from timestamps as it actually ran, never from the documented flowchart.

## Ground Rules

- Trace, never redesign. The stage set, routing rules, scoring model, and handoff processes are inputs. If one of them is the defect, say so in one line and route to the matching skill in Reference - do not rebuild it here.
- The deliverable is a leak register, never a hygiene checklist. Stale-deal counts, missing fields, and push counts are input signals for locating leaks; reporting them as the finding is a different skill's job (`mbfinotti/revops-skills@sales-pipeline-hygiene`). Leakage asks where records and dollars exited without an accounted-for reason, and what that is worth.
- Nothing is a leak until it passes the three-way classification below. Counting healthy disqualification as leakage is the most common false finding in this genre. Mistaking a data-capture gap for a funnel drop is the second most common.
- Size the recoverable amount, never the gross. Presenting the gross pipeline value of stalled deals as "leaked revenue" is the standard way these reports lose credibility with finance.
- Stay on one funnel instance for one period and one entry cohort. Program-level patterns across teams, funnels, or quarters are out of scope.
- Label every numeric threshold with its provenance: published practice, practitioner consensus, or derived from the user's own data. Never present a vendor heuristic as an industry constant.
- Warn off the circulating speed-to-lead statistics below - the vendor pages carrying them cite nothing:
  - "respond in 5 minutes = 100x more likely"
  - "21x more likely to qualify"
  - "average B2B response time is 42 hours"
  - "38% of leads never reply"
  - the "391% / 60-second rule"

  The HBR 2011 paper "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (Oldroyd, McElheran, Elkington) is real and citable as evidence that response latency matters, but the specific multipliers commonly attached to it were not verifiable. Measure the user's own response-time-vs-conversion curve and derive the threshold from that.

## The Conservation Test

Every record that enters a funnel step must leave it through exactly one countable outcome:

- **advanced**
- **closed-lost with a recorded reason**
- **disqualified/recycled with a recorded reason**
- **still open inside that step's expected dwell window**

Build the reconciliation per transition:

```
entered  =  advanced + lost(reason) + di