Forecasts broke until we added exit criteria

We had 23 live opps in HubSpot, and 8 of them were sitting in “proposal sent” with no next meeting booked. I stopped treating those as pipeline. The fix was boring: every stage now needs one owner, one dated next step, and one artifact before it can move. If the note says “waiting on internal review” but nobody can name the reviewer, it gets pushed back out of forecast. I also made AE updates happen in the same Slack thread as the call recap, so I can check the paper trail in under 2 minutes. The weird part is that our forecast got smaller before it got better. That was the point. I’d rather have 14 clean opps than 31 nice-looking ones that die in the middle of procurement.