Closing More with Weekly Pipeline Reviews

Companies should review their deal pipeline periodically. Larger organizations are disciplined around regular opportunity pipeline reviews with their different sales teams. Smaller service providers, in many cases, can improve their sales operations activities.

Deals and opportunities are often tracked in the company’s CRM system. As different sales team contribute their deals to the CRM, the list expands, and the complexity of tracking the progress of each opportunity increases.

Sales can be hectic. Finding the time to pause and assess the best next action on a specific opportunity can be insightful for sales teams. At the same time, collaborating with peers, coaches, and supervisors can also bring out-of-the-box perspectives that can add value to the seller.

A weekly pipeline review is a best practice in which a seller’s CRM opportunity list is discussed with individuals outside of that sales team. This meeting typically involves the team’s supervisor, but it can also include technical folks, operations professionals, or other company executives and advisors who bring novel views to help the selling team close more deals.

The goal of the pipeline review meeting is to help the sales team accelerate deals and advance opportunities to later stages of the pipeline, concluding in a closed-won deal. Typical discussions include the description of blockers for specific opportunities, objection-handling arguments, suggestions on tactics to unlock deal progression, ad hoc collaboration from other groups in the organization that can help prove value, prioritization of the best next steps, etc.

This periodic exercise brings back a focus on sales and deals to any organization and helps align priorities around customer needs.

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