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Succession Bio works with life science/biotech companies to help drive sales, licensing, and partnership opportunities.

We do this through market research to identify the right companies and people, craft scientifically credible messages, and then perform the outbound sales and marketing tactics on your behalf to facilitate meetings with the right people at the right companies.

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It's pipeline review day, your manager says, let's look at your growth Q-on-Q or what's going to close this month, SO! You open the CRM. You stare at the number. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you already know that at least a third of it is noise at best but most likely nonsense to make you or your manager have warm fuzzy feelings about how good and fat your pipe is….we have all exaggerated our pipe!  

That "verbal commit" from February that you haven't heard from in six weeks. The VP who was "really interested" at ELRIG but was actually just being polite over a mediocre coffee. The evaluation that got "deprioritised" in January and somehow never got reprioritised.

They're all still in there. Making your forecast look respectable. Making your Monday morning stand-up feel slightly less painful. And nobody, not you, not your manager, not the VP of Sales staring at the board deck, wants to be the first person to say "half of this isn't real."

I've trained enough life science sales teams to know this isn't unusual. It's the norm. Most pipelines I look at are somewhere between 30% and 40% fantasy. Not because reps are dishonest, but because the incentive structure is completely backwards. You get praised for a big pipeline number. You get questioned when you remove deals. So dead opportunities sit there like squatters, and everyone pretends they'll close eventually.

They're not going to close, accept it, and focus!

In most industries, dead deals are fairly obvious. Someone tells you no. You move on. But life science sales have a unique quality: deals can look alive for months without actually going anywhere, because sales cycles are so long and buying committees are so large that there's always a plausible reason things haven't moved yet:

None of these people is actively rejecting you. They're just not buying from you either. And in that grey zone between "interested" and "committed," zombie deals thrive.

The average life science buying committee involves about seven people. Seven. And 78% of reps have a relationship with exactly one of them. So you've got a single thread into a complex organisation, and you're forecasting revenue based on what that one person told you three months ago.

Right, practical bit. Take your pipeline right now and go through every single deal. Actually do it. Don't just read these and nod along thinking "yeah, I should do that sometime." Open the CRM, pull up the list, and be properly brutal with yourself.

Has anything genuinely changed since your last real conversation? 

And I mean genuinely. Not "I sent a follow-up email." Not "I liked their post on LinkedIn." Has new information been shared? Have you spoken to a new person at the account? Has the timeline moved in either direction? If the honest answer is that nothing's actually changed in three weeks, you need to stop calling it an active deal. It's not active. It's just sitting there making your pipeline look bigger than it is.

Can your contact give you a specific next step with a specific date? 

This is the one that catches people out. "Let's reconnect after the holidays" is not a next step. "We'll review it internally" is not the next step. A next step is something specific, on a specific date, in someone's calendar. If they won't commit to that, they are telling you exactly where this deal stands. Most reps just don't want to hear it.

How many people at this account have you actually spoken to? 

If the answer is one, your deal is hanging by a thread, and you probably don't even realise it. One job change, one maternity leave, one internal reorg, and your entire opportunity vanishes overnight. A deal built on a single relationship is fragile, not qualified.

Is the stall real or is it an excuse? 

Sometimes deals genuinely stall for legitimate reasons. Budgets freeze. Acquisitions happen. Programmes get cancelled. If that's the case, accept it, move it out, move on. 

No amount of follow-up fixes a budget that doesn't exist. But if they're telling you things like "we need more time to evaluate" or "the timing isn't quite right," there's almost always something else going on underneath. 

Maybe they've got a competing priority you don't know about. Maybe they don't have internal buy-in. Maybe they just don't know how to tell you no. Your job is to diagnose which one it is before you decide whether to keep the deal or kill it.

And finally, the gut check. 

Would you bet five hundred quid of your own money on this deal closing this quarter? Your money. Not the company's. If you wouldn't put your hand in your own pocket for it, why is it sitting in your forecast, making everything look rosier than it actually is?

I know. "If I cut half my pipeline, my manager is going to lose it."

Maybe. For about a day. But here's what I've watched happen every single time a rep actually goes through this exercise properly and commits to it. They panic for about a week because the number looks terrifying. Then something shifts. They start closing at nearly twice the rate, because instead of spreading their time and energy across thirty "maybe" conversations, they're properly focused on fifteen real ones. 

Their forecasting suddenly becomes accurate, which means their manager actually starts trusting their numbers. Their win rates climb because they're putting real effort into deals that are actually going somewhere instead of chasing ghosts every Tuesday afternoon.

And the other thing that happens, the thing nobody expects, is that prospecting picks up. When your pipeline is bloated with zombies, there's no urgency to find new opportunities because the number looks fine on paper. Strip it back to reality, and suddenly you're motivated to pick up the phone, send the outreach, and fill the top of the funnel with fresh opportunities that have a genuine pulse.

Fifteen real deals will out-close fifty fantasies. I've watched it happen too many times to have any doubt about that.

Now, the conversation with your manager. Here's how you frame it. You're not shrinking your pipeline because you're struggling. You're getting honest about which deals are actually going to close, so you can spend your time winning them instead of babysitting dead opportunities. 

Present it as a discipline, not a disaster. Walk into the review with a clean, honest number and say "These are the deals I believe in, and here's exactly why." The managers worth working for will respect that more than a fantasy number that misses every quarter. And the ones who don't? They were going to blame you for the miss regardless.

One last thing. Build this into your week. Every Friday, five minutes, go through every deal.

Green: active, next step booked, more than one contact engaged, connected to a funded initiative. These are your real deals.

Amber: Something's gone quiet. You need to intervene this week, or it's going red. Pick up the phone, test the champion, find out what's actually happening.

Red: no movement in weeks, single-threaded, no committed next step. If it's been red for four consecutive Fridays, move it out. Send the breakup message. Let it go.

Your pipeline is a to-do list, not a wish list. Make sure everything on it deserves to be there.

P.S. If you read all of that and thought "yeah, but my pipeline's different, those deals are all real"... pick your top five deals right now and run them through those questions. I dare you.

Or If you need a framework to help you requalify the RED ones, use the requalification framework below.

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