In many SMEs one or two salespeople end up owning most of the pipeline. They are good at opening conversations, so every new enquiry lands with them, and after a few months they own sixty or eighty open deals. Nobody can follow up that many properly. The deals at the bottom of the list stop moving, but they stay open, keep their amount and keep counting in the forecast. Pomio CRM recommends agreeing how many open deals one person can realistically work, and using that number to spot overload early.
Why too many open deals per person hurts the pipeline
An open deal is a promise that someone is working on it. That only holds when the owner gives it attention: a call, a proposal, a dated next step. When one person has more deals than time, the least promising ones are quietly ignored. They age in their stage, which you can see if the CRM shows days in the current stage, and they make the pipeline look bigger than it is. That is the same effect as unqualified deals in a forecast: the total grows while the real chance of closing does not.
Why a hard limit is the wrong tool
A rule that blocks the 41st deal sounds tidy, but it pushes real opportunities out of the CRM. Salespeople start keeping new leads in their inbox or a notebook until a slot frees up, and then nobody else can see them. It also treats every deal as equal, while a large tender takes far more time than a small repeat order. Keep the CRM complete and use the number as a threshold that starts a conversation, not as a wall.
How to set a sensible threshold
Start from time, not from ambition. Ask how many deals one person can give a meaningful next step within the next two weeks, given their other work. For a salesperson with long, complex deals that might be twenty; for someone handling short, simple deals it might be fifty. Set the number per role rather than per person, write it down next to your stage definitions, and check it every few months against what actually happens. Deals that are on hold with an agreed restart date can be counted separately, as long as that stage is not used to hide work.
What to do when someone is above it
Look at the number in the weekly pipeline review. When someone is above the threshold, the first step is clean-up, not redistribution: deals without contact for weeks are updated or closed as lost, as described in closing quiet open deals after inactivity. If the person is still over the line after that, the manager decides which deals move to a colleague, and the new owner takes over the full record so every deal keeps a single owner. Do not compare people on the count itself; the question is whether every open deal has someone who is actually working on it.