Deal

A deal is one customer and one possible sale, followed from the first inquiry to payment or refusal. It is the main unit of a sales system. Stages, amounts, next steps and forecasts all hang on deals, and people and companies sit one level up. A customer who buys twice is two deals, because each purchase has its own amount, its own dates and its own outcome.

In a CRM a deal is a record linked to a contact or a company. It has a stage, an amount, an owner and a next step, and later a decision date and a reason for closing. Most CRMs create a deal from an inquiry automatically or with one click. Creating the record is the easy part. It is worth something only while its fields are up to date.

A customer who buys twice is two deals.

In a team of 2 to 10 sellers, each seller owns their open deals, and the head of sales cannot read all of them every week. So the weekly review works by exception. It looks at deals with no next step, deals with a passed date and deals stuck in one stage longer than usual. Each seller brings their own exceptions, and the meeting spends its time on those and nothing else.

A deal is active when the customer has confirmed interest and a next step with a due date is recorded. Count active deals separately from all open records. The gap between the two numbers is the part of your pipeline that runs on hope. It also answers a practical question: do sellers need more inquiries, or should they work the deals they already have?

Most terms in this glossary are counted in deals. Conversion counts deals that moved from one stage to the next. Win rate counts deals that ended in a sale among those decided. Average deal size divides revenue by the number of won deals. If the definition of a deal changes from one month to the next, none of the three can be compared. Write the definition down once and stick to it.

• Keeping one deal per customer forever. Repeat purchases then hide inside one record. Open a new deal for each new possible sale.
• Leaving deals without an amount, so you cannot count pipeline coverage or the forecast. Enter an estimate early and update it at the proposal.
• Giving a deal no owner, or two. Name one seller per deal. Others can help, but one person answers for the next step.
• Never closing lost deals, so the pipeline looks bigger than it is. Close a deal with a reason when the customer says no or stops answering.

By Friday, each seller opens their list of open deals and fills three fields on each: an amount, an owner and a next step with a date. If a deal cannot get these, close it with a reason. Example (invented numbers): a seller has 40 open deals and only 22 have a dated next step, so that seller’s active pipeline is 22 deals. The review starts with those 22, not with all 40.

CRM rules the team follows and a forecast review you can run every week.