Revenue Operations and the Ghost State

Once, when I'd started a new job, I pretty quickly noticed someone had added a field to Salesforce called "Real Close Date." It's probably obvious: we already had a Close Date (it's native to Salesforce). It didn't take much to deduce something was up.

So I stared at both fields side by side and compared for a long while. The naming was interesting as it could possibly contained more useful information than whatever had started my data journey. Real Close Date. Which raised an immediate, pretty devastating question about (regular) Close Date. The one that was required, the one that flowed absolutely everywhere: forecasts, reports, meetings, every hope and dream we shared as a group of people working on something. Whereas Real Close Date was up to something else, only a few columns away, devoid of those same ambitions. As far as I could piece together, somebody created it because they needed somewhere official-to-them that wasn't the actual official place to put a date they had in their head.

This is probably the point where the story could become one about data hygiene and discipline. Two fields for one thing, inconsistent definitions, unauthorized customizations, somebody has to clean this up (me). Instead I found that Real Close Date was... a bit better.

Of course it was?

Close Date. Real Close Date.

The second one carried zero obligations: not one link to anything else in the system. Nothing I feared to see. Deeper under the hood, it wasn't used by anything else. Someone had made it, apparently as an afterthought, and only sometimes filled it in. It could be empty and at peace. It could change three times, be wildly wrong.

Close Date was different, although at first I had trouble explaining to myself exactly how.

The feeling is sort of that moment where you realize too late that the lane you normally drive in has ceased to be a lane. Should have turned two streets back, but how could you know that, but also argh now you are just sitting still. There's an overlarge excavator doing something enormous six feet from your window that seems like it might take out the whole area. A truck is halfway across the road at an angle that feels wrong in your bones. The pedestrians are furious despite having, to my eye, several perfectly good options. The cyclist in front of you has decided that putting one foot on the pavement would constitute a moral defeat. Nobody knows whose turn it is.

Everybody "communicates" through tiny, annoyed forward rolls of the car and increasingly intense eye contact.

Then somebody flips an orange sign.

STOP. So you stop.

A minute later the same person turns it around.

SLOW.

And off I go, everybody goes, despite nobody knowing what is even happening to the road, what the road will look like tomorrow, how slow SLOW is, or why the cyclist is angrily gesturing at that weird-angled truck.

I don't know why the two CRM fields put me back on the road, but they did. Maybe one is the STOP and one is the SLOW, I don't really know, but I remember looking at Close Date again. There were a lot of cars behind it.

I could give you a long, wandering story that plays up that discovery: wow, "Real" Close Date. But I'll skip to the end, which is what changed in my thinking after that. Similar discoveries happen all the time in life: spreadsheets that hold the real data when it should be in the purchased tool, the person who holds the real documentation in their head.^[1]

Post Real Close Date, I've come to accept the human condition of the world beneath the official world, the world whose purpose is to navigate around or point out that the official world might be off a little, or lying a little, or too polished to match to reality. Or to make you remember to question what is real.

I don't think I had the phrase “ghost state” at that point, nor do I remember when I started thinking of it that way.^[2] I just started noticing this particular kind of doubleness, and now that's what I think of it. Although I'm still not sure which side is haunting which.

What happens when you discover a ghost and try to drag it into daylight?

Make the ghost real? Make everyone see it, admit it exists?

You find the thing everyone uses for real, or the thing that is the most honest version of what you should all care about, or the additional categories to apply to stuff that is just a little bit more honest, and you immediately think: yes, here we go! This is what we should put in the system now.

But wasn't Real Close Date useful because no one cared about it? It wasn't flowing everywhere? We make Real Close Date into Close Date and suddenly what made it useful: poof, gone.

Which is a strange problem if your job includes cleaning things up, finding ghosts, pointing at them or getting that GhostBusters trap thing underneath it.

Sometimes you have to do that, but, but, but...I'm convinced you should know that making it official will just cause a different haunt, spook, or fright to pop up somewhere else.

Of course, ghosts can also be full of it. Completely unable to influence reality like Patrick Swayze first trying to kick the can.

Private numbers can be wishful thinking just as much as the official set. Somebody's special categorization might only exist because they and they alone are absolutely convinced they are right about this one thing that is somehow different than the taxonomy everyone mostly agrees does 98% of the job. There are perfectly human reasons something might live in the shadows besides that the official system is wrong or off or not useful.

Finding the ghost state doesn't always answer very much. At minimum, it's a curiosity starter. But sometimes curiosity goes nowhere. Why did someone need this? Answer: they didn't, they just didn't know about this thing over here that does that same thing, but better.

Is the ghost showing me something the system actually can't see? Or is this like a box of old cables under a desk, waiting to be thrown away?

So, was Real Close Date right? Close Date wrong? Was Real Close Date only sometimes right?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Someone ultimately needed a different spot in which to think. People need that. And once you remember that, you start looking for what lies beneath.