I've watched that question get asked in conference rooms throughout my career. At IBM, where I spent 25 years, including eight in sales leadership, and later at DXC, Insight and Pragma, the company changed but the scene didn't. Marketing said the leads were good. Sales said they weren't. The pipeline looked healthy right up until the quarter closed, and someone senior got pulled into one more deal to save the number.

The easy answer was usually the people: hire more reps, replace the VP, buy another tool. The cause was not always where leaders first looked. I learned to examine deal quality, team execution, handoffs and management cadence before recommending a fix. Often, what was missing was someone who owned the whole system, from the first marketing touch to the signed contract. Nobody had agreed on what a qualified opportunity was, handoffs happened by habit, and the forecast was a collection of hopes instead of a discipline. When I built a complete US go to market model at Pragma, connecting tools, people and process, it became clear how often the fix lives in the connections, not the parts.