Field Guides

The Revenue Leak Diagnostic Checklist

By Wayne·Published ·Updated

Short answer

Twenty-two places revenue quietly leaks out of B2B businesses, grouped into pipeline, onboarding, delivery, retention, and pricing. Walk the list once a quarter — you don't need AI to find most of them, you need someone to actually look.

Where revenue quietly leaks

Revenue leaks rarely show up in the P&L as a line item. They show up as churn nobody explained, discounts nobody tracked, expansions that never happened, and renewals forecast off a field that hadn't been updated in ninety days. Here's the checklist we walk inside a Diagnostic.

Pipeline (six leaks)

  • Inbound leads that go 48+ hours without follow-up.
  • Qualified conversations with no owner assigned in the CRM.
  • Proposals sent without a follow-up cadence attached.
  • Pricing exceptions granted with no record of precedent.
  • "Nurture" as the CRM status where deals go to die.
  • Deals with a close date more than 30 days in the past.

Onboarding (five leaks)

  • Signed clients waiting more than a week for kickoff.
  • Onboarding steps duplicated across two or more tools.
  • No first-value milestone defined for the first 30 days.
  • Success criteria never written down or agreed to.
  • Handoff from sales to delivery with no shared context doc.

Retention & renewal (six leaks)

  • Renewals with no owner in the 90 days before expiry.
  • Product usage not visible to the people responsible for retention.
  • QBRs happening only when the customer asks for one.
  • Expansion signals (new use case, new team) not routed to anyone.
  • Support tickets not tagged for renewal risk.
  • Renewal price increases decided without a value story attached.

Delivery and pricing leaks round out the twenty-two. If more than eight of these apply, revenue is leaking faster than any single AI use case can plug it — the ordering matters.

Related service

Turn the operating signal from this resource into a scored map of where work, revenue, and decisions are stuck — plus a practical 30–90 day roadmap.

See what's in the diagnostic

FAQ

Who is The Revenue Leak Diagnostic Checklist for?

Founder-led and operator-led teams evaluating where AI can improve workflows, decisions, revenue motion, retention, customer experience, or employee experience without adding more tool sprawl.

What should I do after reading this?

Use the concepts to identify one expensive operating constraint, then pressure-test it with the Operating Clarity Scan before investing in tools, automations, or a larger diagnostic.