Deal Review

A deal review is the weekly meeting where a manager and a rep sit down with a shortlist of opportunities and argue about whether they're real. Not a pipeline scrub of every open deal — a focused pass through the ones in commit or best-case category, or any deal that's slipped a stage past the benchmark time in stage for its size. The output is a forecast number the manager is willing to defend to their own boss, which is a lower bar than "the deal will close" and a higher bar than "the rep believes it."

How a Deal Review Is Run

Most templates borrow their checklist from whatever methodology the org runs — MEDDPICC, MEDDIC, or a homemade version — and turn it into yes/no questions instead of prose:

Deals that fail two or more of these get downgraded a forecast category on the spot, regardless of what the rep entered in the CRM that morning.

Worked Example

A manager reviews twelve deals sitting in commit, worth $1.4 million combined. Walking the checklist, four of them — $380,000 total — turn out to have no scheduled meeting with an economic buyer, just a rep's assurance that "they're bought in." The manager moves those four to best-case. Commit drops from $1.4 million to $1.02 million before the number ever reaches the VP's forecast roll-up. That's the entire point of the meeting: catch the gap between what's in Salesforce and what's actually true before it becomes an executive's bad guess.

When Sales Orgs Use Deal Review

Frontline managers run it weekly as their primary coaching mechanism — it's where a manager finds out a rep hasn't actually met the champion's boss, three weeks after claiming the deal was "verbally committed." VP Sales relies on the aggregated output to set regional forecast confidence heading into the quarterly business review. RevOps builds the checklist template and owns keeping it aligned with whatever deal desk requires before a discount gets approved. Finance downstream cares about none of the mechanics and everything about the resulting number, since deal review output feeds directly into forecast accuracy reporting.

Where Deal Review Breaks Down

The meeting is only as honest as the room lets it be, and every incentive in the room points toward optimism. A manager under pressure to hit a number develops the same happy ears they're supposed to be checking the rep for, and waves through a "yes" on economic buyer that was really a maybe. Reps learn the checklist and answer it correctly without the underlying fact being true — reciting "mutual action plan in place" when the plan is a template nobody at the customer has looked at is deal review theater, verbal fluency standing in for evidence.

Low-dollar deals get skipped by default because the meeting only has time for the big ones, so the smaller pipeline runs with zero scrutiny and absorbs the org's actual no-decision rate with nobody watching. The fix isn't a longer meeting. It's requiring the checklist answers to point at timestamped CRM artifacts — a logged meeting, a signed mutual action plan, a dated email — instead of a rep's spoken confidence, which is the same standard a deal desk should hold before approving a discount on a deal nobody outside the account team has verified.