/revops-incident-response — Decide which leak to fix first

/revops measures the plumbing and stops. This decides what to do about it, in what order, by when.

The unit rule, because it's easy to get wrong: evidence is per-lead, the verdict is systemic. A cohort stat ("483 companies died at intro→trial") names a leak but can't explain it — and an explanation invented from a cohort stat is exactly what gets invalidated on review. Tracing twenty named leads individually tells you why, which tells you what to fix. You ship a systemic decision backed by named leads, not a list of leads to chase.

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Workflow at a glance

Phase	Purpose	Output
0. Data-quality gate	Is the CRM trustworthy enough to draw a conclusion from?	PASS / PASS_WITH_CAVEATS / HALT
1. Detection	Which named leads are stalled beyond SLA, per stage?	Named leads — never cohorts
2. Investigation	Why did each one stall?	Per-lead root cause, each citing a quote
3. Triage	Which leak first, how long, in what order?	Branch + fix-time + Day-0/1/14
4. Hand-off	Who executes?	Named skill + a history.md entry

Phase 0 can end the run. That is a feature, not a failure mode — see below.

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Phase 0 — The data-quality gate (runs first, can halt)

Never trust a leak number before you've checked whether the CRM can support one.

This exists because it already went wrong. ClientCo's 0226-funnel-analysis.md shipped a confident H2-decline story attributed to a named rep's departure. Team review found she worked in CS, not sales, and her attributed deals were likely CRM reassignments. The same doc flags "57% of deals have no assigned rep" — then corrects itself: "this is likely a CRM data quality issue (no automated self-serve deal creation exists), not evidence of self-serve dominance." Its own priority action reads: "Before requesting rep-level data, audit HubSpot deal lifecycle practices first."

That is this phase, written by the client's own analysis, in advance.

Check five things (detail + thresholds → the premium reference):

1. Unassigned deals — what share have no owner? Is that real self-serve or missing automation?
2. Defunct stages — is any stage still in the schema but dead in practice? (ClientCo: "the MQL stage is effectively defunct since the HubSpot migration".)
3. Stage-skipping — deals jumping stages mean stage timestamps can't carry a stall calculation.
4. Attribution integrity — are owners assigned by role, or by reassignment artifact?
5. Definition drift across systems — the same word meaning different things in two tools. (ClientCo: "'MQL' means different things across HubSpot and Triple Dart".)

Verdicts.

• PASS → proceed to Phase 1.
• PASS_WITH_CAVEATS → proceed, but every downstream verdict carries the named caveat inline. Not a footnote.
• HALT → stop. Emit no leak verdict. The finding is the data problem, and the deliverable is the fix-list for it. Hand back to /revops.

A HALT is a successful run. Shipping a confident leak verdict on untrustworthy data is the failure this skill exists to prevent — and it has already happened once on this client.

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Phase 1 — Detection (named leads, never cohorts)

Read the live CRM. Query stage-entry timestamps and find leads sitting past their stage SLA.

Output shape: a named lead, its stage, days stalled, owner, and deal context. Twenty named rows beat a percentage. If the answer comes back as "59.3% converted," you've reproduced the audit, not triaged it.

Live read via HubSpot MCP (query_crm_data, search_crm_objects, get_crm_objects). Read-only — never write to a client CRM. This is the first skill in the workspace declaring mcps_used: [hubspot]; access is viewer-level per ClientCo/goals/measurement.md.

Redact before you reason: end-client names, emails, phones, account numbers → [CLIENT-n] per pii-redaction.md. ClientCo is FCA-regulated and their CRM carries end-client financial detail. Keep the roles, the company, the deal shape — mask the identity.

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Phase 2 — Investigation (root cause, quoted)

For each stalled lead, trace across systems and answer why this one.

Sources: CRM stage history (what moved, when, and what didn't) + call transcripts. Parse transcripts with the existing adapter spec at `research/win-loss/the premium reference — WebVTT / SRT / Gong / Fireflies / Otter / Grain / generic JSON / plaintext. Don't rebuild it. (Granola arrives via MCP as a delivery source, not a sniffed format.)

Every root cause cites a verbatim quote + speaker, per evidence-bound-outputs.md. No quote → mark [INFERRED: from X + Y] or drop the claim. Never invent the reason a deal stalled.

[CLIENT-7] · Intro → Trial · stalled 34d · owner: [REP]
Root cause: pricing, not fit — "we'd need sign-off above 20k and I can't get that this quarter"
            (buyer, [11:04]). Trial never provisioned.

Do not screenshot the journey. Zapier's system reconstructed lead journeys via browser automation because their security team blocked MCP connectors. That was their constraint; HubSpot is a live connector here. MCP reads beat screenshots — importing their workaround would import their handicap.

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Phase 3 — Triage (branch → fix-time → Day-0/1/14)

Aggregate the per-lead causes, then decide. Five branches — full trees, thresholds, and fix-time estimates → the premium reference:

Branch	Fires when the per-lead causes cluster on…	First action
1. Qualification leak	Wrong-fit leads reaching a stage they can't clear (pricing shock, size mismatch)	Add the qualification gate one stage earlier
2. No-nurture leak	Right-fit leads going quiet with no follow-up mechanism	Ship the missing sequence for the largest cohort
3. Handoff leak	Stalls at an owner change or an SLA with no tracking	Instrument the SLA before changing it
4. Product/proof leak	A recurring objection engineering or marketing must answer	Route the objection, don't re-sell it
5. Phantom leak	The "leak" is a reporting artifact	Back to /revops — this isn't a funnel problem

State the volume floor. Per quantitative-evidence-floors.md: no "biggest leak" verdict below the floor. Under it, give a directional read and say so. Name the confounds — seasonality, attribution window, conversion lag — before crediting a cause.

Multi-branch: when causes split across branches, rank by recoverable volume × inverse fix-time, and say what you're not doing.

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Phase 4 — Reporting + hand-off

Compose, don't build. Recurrence via /schedule; the weekly roll-up via /dashboard, which ships a pipeline-visualization template. No new cron infrastructure — that layer exists.

Hand off by branch: nurture gap → /email-nurture or /lifecycle · qualification gap → /funnel-strategy · plumbing/reporting → back to /revops. Append a [REVOPS] line to the client's history.md.

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Anti-Hallucination Guardrails

1. Never fabricate a leak number. Live CRM read or nothing. If the MCP is unavailable, say so and stop — per the financial-data.md posture, do not reconstruct pipeline data from memory or from a stale doc.
2. Never invent a root cause. Quote or lower the confidence.
3. Never skip Phase 0. The gate exists because the failure already happened on this client.
4. Never write to the CRM. Read-only, always.
5. Never crown a leak below the volume floor. Directional read + caveat instead.
6. Never ship an unredacted end-client name. FCA-bound data.

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Integration with other skills

Skill	Relationship
/revops	The audit half. It measures the plumbing; this decides. A HALT hands straight back to it.
/win-loss	Explains closed-lost deals with transcripts. This explains silently-stalled leads. Different populations; its transcript adapters are reused here.
/lead-scoring	Prospective — should we pursue this account? This is retrospective — why did this one die?
/funnel-strategy	Defines the stages and SLAs this measures stalls against. Hand-off target for Branch 1.
/email-nurture · /lifecycle	Hand-off targets for Branch 2.

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Quality checks (pre-output)

Full gate → the premium reference. The load-bearing five:

• Phase 0 emitted an explicit verdict before any leak claim. A HALT emitted no leak verdict at all.
• Detection names actual leads. If the output is a percentage, it's an audit — start over.
• Every root cause carries a verbatim quote + speaker, or is marked [INFERRED] / dropped.
• The volume floor is stated; confounds and lag are named.
• End-client PII masked. Nothing written to the CRM.

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Final ship gate

Run /premortem --output before ship. See /premortem skill for the 5 execution domains and output template.

Then run /scope-guardian-reviewer — the client-deliverable ship gate: scope-creep check on proposals/SOWs (pm-loop.md). Live-CRM findings invite scope sprawl; this is the gate that catches "while we're in here…".

Trivial-case escape: ## Premortem\nNo failure modes — trivial change satisfies the contract for genuinely trivial outputs.

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Attribution

The Detection → Investigation → Reporting shape, and specifically the per-lead granularity + recurrence that our cohort-level audit thinking wouldn't have produced, is adapted from Zapier's internal lead-leakage agent system as described in "Zapier's no lead left behind agent", Demand Collective, accessed 2026-07-16. Cite-only — concept port, zero code. Their browser-automation implementation is deliberately not ported (see Phase 2). See .claude/discovery/0726-zapier-lead-leakage-steal-analysis.md.

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