You will be able to run a pipeline review that ends with each rep knowing their next steps.
Open your CRM and pick one deal you expect to discuss at your next pipeline review. Next to it, write the last thing the buyer did on that deal and the date they did it. If the buyer has done nothing in the past two weeks, the deal has not moved, however much work you have put into it. The weekly review below is built around checks like this one.
Picture a team at 9am on a Monday morning, with the CRM up on a screen. The manager goes through the deals one by one and asks "Where are we with this one?" and "When will it close?" The reps answer "looking good" and "end of the month, probably". The meeting lasts ninety minutes and produces almost no new information. Afterwards, two reps decide to update the CRM only on Sunday nights, so there is less for the manager to ask about.
Most pipeline reviews feel like this, an inspection that produces very little. In a review like that, reps learn to manage the meeting instead of managing their deals. Questions such as "How do you feel about this deal?" make it worse, because they invite a feeling, and reps are optimists by trade. A deal that feels good can still be missing a decision maker, a budget and a date.
Start every deal discussion from the written sales process you built in module 4. For each deal, ask what stage it is in and whether both exit criteria for the previous stage are actually met. At the "proposal seen" stage, for example, the questions are whether the buyer has discussed the proposal with the rep, and whether the decision date is agreed.
These are yes or no questions, and the answer is either in the CRM or it is not. Working this way changes the tone of the meeting. The manager stops judging how confident the rep sounds, and both of them look at the deal against a standard the team agreed. When an answer is no, the conversation moves naturally to what would make it yes.
The single most useful question in a pipeline review is "What has the buyer done since last week?" Most reps first answer a different question, which is what they did themselves: sent the proposal, followed up twice, left a voicemail. That is activity on one side of the deal only.
A deal moves only when the buyer acts. Buyer actions include replying, attending a meeting, introducing a colleague, sharing a document and giving feedback on the price. If the buyer has done nothing for two weeks, the deal has not moved, however busy the rep has been. Lesson 5.3, "Spotting deals that will slip", treats buyer inactivity as one of the warning signs of a slipping deal.
Wei Ming, a sales manager, started asking his reps this question every week. Raj, one of his reps, struggled with it for the first two weeks. On one deal Raj had sent three follow-up emails, the buyer had replied to none of them, and Raj still described the deal as "active". When Wei Ming asked what the buyer had done, Raj paused and admitted the buyer had done nothing. That pause was the most useful moment of the meeting, because it led to a plan to reach the buyer another way, through the HR manager Raj had met at the first meeting.
Every deal discussion ends with an agreed next action, which is a specific task with an owner and a date. "Follow up" does not count as an action. "Call the HR manager on Wednesday to ask whether the finance director has seen the proposal" does. Write the actions down during the meeting, in the CRM or in a shared note, and open next week's review by checking them. After a few weeks the meeting falls into a rhythm: last week's actions, then what the buyer did in response, then this week's actions.
Keep the time per deal short. If a deal needs more than five minutes, it needs its own conversation, so note it, book a separate slot with the rep, and move on. A review that spends half an hour on one deal leaves no time for the others.
A pipeline review has two jobs, forecasting and coaching, and mixing them makes both worse. Forecast questions ask which deals will close this period, and for how much. They need short, factual answers, such as whether the deal is a commit and whether the close date has moved. Lesson 5.2, coming up, covers the forecast categories. Coaching questions ask how this rep can move this deal forward. They are open and take longer: what do you think is stopping the buyer, who else could you talk to, what did they say when you asked about the budget.
When the two are mixed, reps learn that admitting a deal is stuck lowers their forecast in front of the team, so they stop admitting it. The fix is to split the meeting into a forecast part and a coaching part.
Wei Ming runs his review in two halves. The first twenty minutes cover forecast deals only, done quickly, with the same four questions for every deal:
What stage is it in, and are the exit criteria met? What has the buyer done since last week? What is the next action, who owns it, and by when? Is it a commit, best case or pipeline deal, and has the close date moved?
These questions come straight from the module 4 process and the lesson 5.2 forecast categories. In the remaining time, each rep brings one or two deals they want help with, and the team suggests next steps.
In the activity below you will write your own pipeline review agenda, including the four questions you will ask about every deal. Write them so a rep could prepare their answers before the meeting starts.
Write a pipeline review agenda listing the four questions you will ask about every deal.
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