Deal Review

A deal review is the meeting. Deal inspection is what should happen inside it. A good deal review takes a handful of opportunities, runs each through MEDDPICC with the seller, and ends with a short list of actions, owners and dates. A bad deal review takes forty opportunities, asks “where are we with this one?”, gets “I’m working it hard” forty times, and ends with everyone agreeing the forecast is fine.

The question it answers: of all the deals in this pipeline, which are real, which are at risk, and what are we doing this week to change that?

The mistake is letting it become a status update. The seller reads out the CRM. The leader nods. Activity is reported as progress: emailed, chased, pushed, nurtured. None of those are MEDDPICC. If a seller cannot articulate the Champion’s economic case in three sentences, the deal is not real, and the effort was theatre. The B in B-Player stands for busy, and the deal review is where busy goes to hide. A leader who accepts effort as evidence will get a pipeline full of it.

How I use it. Fewer deals, more depth. I would rather inspect five opportunities properly than skim thirty. I ask the seller to lead with the weakest letter, because the strong ones look after themselves. I judge the quality of the decisions made in the deal, not the colour of the stage. And I keep the actions. A deal review that produces no actions was a meeting about a meeting. If the same deal turns up three weeks running with the same gap and no movement, that is the signal to qualify out, and it is better to hear it in a review than on the last day of the quarter.