Understanding the importance of pipeline review meetings
A pipeline review is a periodic meeting to review and validate all opportunities in the sales funnel. It ensures data are clean and aligned with reality. It is a prerequisite for an accurate sales forecast. Without such meetings, the pipeline's quality quickly degenerates.
Maintaining a high-quality pipeline is crucial for accurate forecasting, strategic decision-making, optimizing your sales process, and overall sales performance. It helps prevent pitfalls and ensures sales reps focus on realistic and achievable goals.
Make sales pipeline review meetings a source of value
A pipeline review is a relatively long meeting and not one of the most loved ones by sellers. It’s key for your sales organization to buy into pipeline management. Here are a few tips a sales manager can keep in mind.
- As a sales leader, explain why pipeline quality is important. It’s not about obsessing over a tool. It’s about avoiding pitfalls, getting better support from others in the company, and finally closing more.
- Fix basic pipeline data hygiene asynchronously, so you spend less time in a meeting doing boring stuff. Have a dashboard on your CRM highlighting missing or grossly incorrect fields. Sort those out before the meeting.
- Run your pipeline in small groups or as dedicated 1:1s. Don’t let too many people idle on a call.
- A clean pipeline should be mandatory to join this and any other meeting that sellers like more. Do your homework, and you will get the help you need to close your deals.
- Be useful to sellers. They should leave the meeting having gained something in exchange for their effort.
How to run a sales pipeline review meeting
A review should proceed rep by rep, reviewing every opportunity in their pipeline, for the current month or quarter and all future quarters. It’s very important to cover ALL opportunities.
A very common situation is having a clean pipeline for the current month or quarter, but a lot of noise after that. This hides issues, kills predictability, and allows sellers to squat on accounts, to delay working on potentially good leads that require more time to convert.
You can go through opportunities in any order, but I suggest going through them by close date starting with the ones closing farther in the future. You will want to talk about the most concrete opportunities, that are closing soon, so this order will force you to go through the rest first.
In the meeting, go through every deal and review whether data are accurate, reflecting reality, and whether there are red flags that mean the opportunity isn’t properly managed. For example, look out for:
- Deals without a planned next step/activity
- Deals without activity in the past 14 days
- Deals stuck in a stage for over X days
- Deals with no close date, or close date in the past
- Deals with no value, or a value lower than X
- Deals with no forecast category
- Deals with forecast category “Pipeline” and close date in the current month/quarter
- Deals where meetings and emails aren’t logged
- …
Build a sales culture centered on your customer
Focus the meeting on getting a customer-in view.
Question sellers on what the prospect said or did, more than what the seller thinks or feels. This is especially true to validate whether the deal qualifies to be in its pipeline stage.
Actively ask the seller:
- What did the customer say to make you believe you were in this stage?
- Who said it?
- When did the customer say the evaluation process would be completed?
- Who exactly said that?
This is the right moment to positively challenge sellers. Validate their assumptions, highlight inconsistencies, offer advice, and focus on pipeline quality and verification.
If a long discussion is needed on how to best close a deal, you better schedule a dedicated deal review.
Make your sales pipeline hygiene a routine
At the beginning, this meeting will take a lot of time for both rep and manager. The pipeline’s quality will be bad, and people may not like it. The more you run these meetings, the more people learn to prepare them properly by keeping their deals updated at all times. Then the meeting won’t take as much and people will start getting a lot of value out of it. An effective sales pipeline review will become the best sparring arena for sellers to focus on the right priorities.
Conclusion
Effective pipeline reviews are a cornerstone of successful sales management. By maintaining clean and accurate data, focusing on customer engagement, and continuously improving the review process, your organization can ensure better sales outcomes and a more strategic approach to pipeline management.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a pipeline review meeting?
A pipeline review is a periodic session where sales teams assess and validate the status of opportunities within the funnel to ensure data accuracy and alignment with reality.
Why is data hygiene important in pipeline management?
Data hygiene is crucial for accurate forecasting, strategic planning, and efficient resource allocation. Clean data ensures the sales team can focus on high-priority opportunities and avoid wasting time on unqualified leads.
How can I make pipeline review meetings more engaging for my sales team?
To make these meetings more engaging, focus on providing value to the sales team, such as offering strategic insights, identifying opportunities for improvement, and recognizing well-managed deals.
What are some common red flags to look for during a pipeline review?
Common red flags include deals with missing next steps, no recent activity, unrealistic close dates, or insufficient deal value. These indicators suggest that the opportunity may not be progressing as expected.
How often should pipeline review meetings be held?
The frequency of pipeline review meetings depends on the sales cycle and the size of the sales team. Typically, monthly or bi-weekly meetings are sufficient, but more frequent reviews may be necessary for fast-paced industries.
Can pipeline review meetings be conducted remotely?
Yes, pipeline review meetings can be effectively conducted remotely using video conferencing tools. Ensure that all participants have access to the necessary data and tools to facilitate a smooth review process.