How to Conduct a Pipeline Review
A pipeline review is one of the most impactful tools sales leadership has to drive action, improve sales forecasting, and, most importantly, support their sales teams. We offer a guideline on structuring the discussion for conducting an impactful pipeline review.
Pipeline reviews are a great way to gauge your sales team's progress toward set goals. We recommend that sales managers regularly review their teams' pipelines to improve sales performance and support daily work.
The goal of each pipeline review is twofold:
- for a sales rep to gain insights and guidance on identifying hurdles preventing opportunities from turning to closed won
- for a sales manager to support their team and gain better visibility of sales pipelines
When done right, pipeline reviews lead to winning opportunities faster and with higher accuracy. It is a sparring conversation to help sellers sell more. It is not a reporting meeting from a rep (or multiple reps) towards a manager.
Here is some guidance on how to structure a pipeline review.
A Pipeline Review Starts With Preparation
A pipeline review is not an ad hoc discussion. The manager and the seller must come prepared for it to be helpful. They should mutually understand the agenda and how to prepare.
How to prepare:
- Both: Both need to recap agreed action points from the previous review.
- Manager: Review the notes from the previous meeting, the rep's KPIs, and targets. Form a general understanding of where to focus in the review.
- Sales rep: The pipeline needs to be up to date, including past and planned sales activities. Ideally, the rep should recognise a few opportunities to ask for support.
How Does the Sales Pipeline Look on a High-Level?
Have a look at the shape of the pipeline. Does it look like a proper pipeline, or should you take some action on a high level? Zoom out. What do you see?
A bird's-eye view is essential when starting regular pipeline reviews. As you conduct the reviews regularly, the trend should be moving your team towards the correct shape and size of the pipeline. Do note that pipelines might have old or unqualified opportunities, even if they look accurate. So, always dig deeper.
When running these reviews regularly, it is good practice to change things around to ensure that all deals are reviewed over time rather than always discussing the same ones. If you have just an hour to discuss all opportunities, it’s not enough, so, again, a regular session is recommended.
Possible ways to review the pipeline are:
- Start from the right side of the pipeline, with the opportunities closest to being won. This will improve sales numbers in the short term.
- Focus on the biggest/most strategic deals, wherever they may be in the pipeline. These are the important ones that seriously move the needle, so it's good to be on top of those.
- Move from left to right and focus on the latest addition to the pipeline. This approach helps evaluate the opportunities from a qualification and discovery point of view, improving opportunity quality early on and positively impacting sales numbers later.
- Evaluate from the oldest opportunity towards newer additions. Do this to clean the pipeline of old stagnant opportunities. You should focus on challenging the rep if some of their opportunities should be open anymore.
- Inspect the stage with the most opportunities first. Presuming the stage with the most deals is not the left-most stage; this is where you will find an opportunity “graveyard.” Reviewing these opportunities will most likely lead to a coaching opportunity.
There is always some flexibility in conducting the pipeline review, and adapting to the individual sales rep is advised.
Dive Deep into Each Opportunity
After establishing the big picture, it’s time to zoom in. Start going through each opportunity together with your sales rep. Let them present the opportunity and then ask questions.
Just a friendly reminder: the idea is not to look for mistakes but to find ways to help the sales rep win their opportunities and, when needed, refocus the efforts by closing some opportunities as lost. After all, there should be no open opportunities in the pipeline that can’t be won within a reasonable time.
The goal is not to look for mistakes but to find ways to help the sales rep win their opportunities.
With each opportunity, the sales rep should be able to present at least the following:
- Why is this a good opportunity to work on? What are the challenges the prospect is facing at the moment?
- Who belongs to the decision-making unit in this opportunity? Do we know all of them?
- What happens next, and by whom? What needs to be done to close the opportunity as won?
As opportunities progress through the pipeline, the amount of details increases. You can use qualifying frameworks like CHAMP to help evaluate the deal with the sales rep.
Before you move to the next opportunity, there should be clear next steps and actions agreed upon for each opportunity. Either already by a rep, or you plan them together.
An excellent rule to follow in pipeline reviews is: If it’s not in CRM, it did not happen. If it's not added to CRM, it will not happen.
Do not let the sales rep dismiss some opportunities as “business as usual” or “nothing new there.” Those are the opportunities you definitely should spend some time on.
Here are some examples of what to keep your eyes open for and how to guide corrective action:
❌ Sales demo was a month ago. No clear next steps were agreed upon, nor a problem to solve was identified. Prospect "is discussing internally" and has not responded to contact attempts.
✅ Close the deal as lost. Focus on other opportunities.
❌ Proposal sent; waiting to hear back after prospect has discussed it internally.
✅ Reach out and ask how their decision-making will progress. Set up a call to review the proposal together with all decision-makers.
❌ Proposal was presented last week. They are presenting internally next week to the economic buyer. Two competing offers are on the table. It's a nailbiter!
✅ Arrange a management handshake. Consider sending a video greeting recapping the agreed pain point and proposed solution to go with the proposal.
Finish Pipeline Review With a Summary and Action
At the end of the review, do the following:
- Revisit the bird' s-eye view of the sales funnel. Especially if you have discovered many “zombie” opportunities that have been closed as lost, the funnel's shape might have drastically changed. Agree on a high level on what needs to happen between now and the next review (such as generating a new pipeline).
- Discuss if a recurring theme emerged in each reviewed opportunity (such as the lack of next steps). If so, this topic is something to keep in mind and try to improve on going further.
- On the opportunity level, ensure both have agreed action points documented in the CRM. Note and agree to any other required action, such as the manager coordinating additional support from marketing. Both need to commit to carrying out planned actions.
Additionally, as a manager, look for similarities between pipeline review findings and your reps. For example, you might notice that most of your team struggles with discovery or product knowledge. Such a discovery is an action point for you to work on and arrange more training and support for them.
When conducted according to these guidelines, regular pipeline reviews empower the team, drive more activities, and improve sales forecast accuracy, benefiting the team and the company.
