A pipeline review that ends with decisions

Every Monday a team of six sat through a pipeline review that took two hours. Each seller read out their deals in order, the head of sales nodded, and at the end someone said “let’s keep an eye on it”. The deals that were moving did not need the meeting. The deals that were stuck had been “watched” for five weeks.

The team was reading statuses aloud. It needed a place to decide what to do with the few deals that would not move on their own.

Deals that moved this week do not need your time. List the deals with no next step, no date or no contact for two weeks. That list is the agenda, and for a team of six it is usually five to seven deals. The rest of the pipeline can be read in the CRM.

Treat two weeks as a starting hypothesis. It is not a benchmark, and your sales cycle may be shorter or longer. Pick a limit that fits your cycle and keep it for a month before you change it.

For each stuck deal ask the same three questions in the same order. If the seller cannot answer the second one, the deal is not under control yet, and that is the most useful thing the meeting can find out.

Let the seller answer. Your job is to ask and to write. Keep the story of how you would have done it to yourself.

• What should be true by now?
• What is true today?
• What is the one step that moves it?

Each stuck deal gets one decision: move it with one named step and one date, fix it by naming the missing piece and its owner, or close it as lost with a reason. A deal can stay “open” only if it has a dated next step.

Closing a deal is a decision too, and nothing to be ashamed of. A pipeline full of deals nobody will pick up this month makes every forecast wrong, and it hides the deals that deserve your attention.

Write each decision in one line: deal, decision, owner, date. The next review starts with last week’s lines, and the first question is always “did it happen?”.

After a month you can see which reasons repeat. Six deals closed with “no budget” are rarely six cases of bad luck. They point to a qualification question for the first call, and now you know to ask it.

• List the deals with no next step or no contact for two weeks.
• Run a 45-minute review with the three questions and one decision for each deal.
• Start the log and open it first at the next review.

A weekly meeting on stuck deals that ends with a decision and an owner for each.