When Elena Voss joined Tidemark as CRO in late 2025, the payroll platform’s mid-market team had a slippage problem, not a pipeline problem. Deals were real and buyers were engaged, yet 33% of committed revenue kept pushing into the next quarter. Forecast calls were spent debating close dates instead of unblocking deals. Two quarters after rolling out Veyro, slipped deals are down 41% and win rates have climbed from 22% to 31%. The interesting part is how little of it was technology.
Diagnose the slip before you fix it
Elena’s RevOps lead, Priya Raman, started by pulling every slipped deal from the previous four quarters into Pipeline Radar and tagging the reason. Three causes accounted for 78% of the slips: no confirmed economic buyer, procurement starting after a verbal commit, and no mutual action plan. None of them were visible in the CRM until it was too late.
That diagnosis shaped everything that followed. Instead of rolling out a new methodology, Tidemark added three checkpoints — each tied to a Signal Veyro could verify automatically.
The three checkpoints
An economic buyer on a call before stage 3. Not cc’d, not mentioned — on a call, speaking. Veyro flags any deal that advances without one.
Procurement kicked off at stage 4, not stage 5. A Playbook drafts the security questionnaire and vendor forms the moment a deal reaches proposal.
A mutual action plan the buyer has seen. Agents draft it from the discovery call, and the rep edits and sends it within 48 hours.
Deals missing a checkpoint don’t get blocked. They get a lower Deal Health score and a spot at the top of the weekly review. That distinction mattered: reps kept full control, and managers knew exactly where to spend their time.
Rolling this out took three weeks, not three months. Priya configured the checkpoints as Veyro Playbooks, ran them in shadow mode on one team for a fortnight, and compared the flagged deals with what managers already suspected. The overlap was high enough that nobody argued about the logic — only about why they hadn’t done it sooner.
“We didn’t need more pipeline. We needed to stop being surprised by the pipeline we already had.”
— Elena Voss, Chief Revenue Officer, Tidemark
What changed in the room
The weekly forecast call went from 90 minutes to 35. Managers now open with the five deals whose Deal Health score moved most, rather than a line-by-line walk through a spreadsheet. Reps arrive prepared because they already know which of their deals will come up — Veyro tells them on Monday morning.
The numbers followed. The median sales cycle shortened from 74 to 61 days, and the share of commit that closed in-quarter rose from 67% to 80%. Priya’s favourite metric is less formal: how often someone says “I thought that deal was fine” on the forecast call. It has dropped to roughly zero.
Tidemark’s advice for teams starting out is refreshingly unglamorous: pick one checkpoint, prove it on one team for a month, then expand. A playbook only works if the people running it believe in it.
