Each sales team should organize a sales pipeline review meeting to evaluate the state of the current sales pipelines and define if there is any room for improvement to boost the performance. Its primary focus is to help sales reps develop a game play to move deals forward.
In this article, let’s take a closer look at the what, why, and how of a sales pipeline meeting.
What Is a Pipeline Review?
A sales pipeline review is a gathering of your sales team or just sales leaders to assess the health of current sales pipelines, identify trends, and discuss improvements. It can take place every two weeks or once per month.
Benefits of Sales Pipeline Review Meeting
A sales pipeline review meeting is crucial because it reveals sales reps’ productivity. It also helps sales leaders identify pipeline risks, trends, and strategies to improve sales performance and sales forecast accuracy.
A sales pipeline review meeting is also a coaching opportunity for you to train your sales reps and strengthen their sales engagements. You can conduct one-to-one meetings with each sales rep to ask them detailed questions, understand in depth what’s happening in their pipeline, and give the exact support they need.
Format of Sales Pipeline Review Meeting
To organize a sales pipeline review meeting effectively, you should have a detailed plan of how your meeting will occur and how you’ll do it.
Consider the following:
- Decide a frequency for your review. Depending on your team, it can be every two weeks or once a month, or every quarter. Try to keep each meeting within 60 minutes.
- Determine if it’s a meeting of the whole team or it’ll be a one-to-one. If you want to take this opportunity to coach your sales rep, pick the latter.
- Choose a review method that best suits your teams. It can be a Zoom call, video chat, or in-person meeting.
- Create a meeting agenda, including the purpose, names of the participants, points to discuss, issues, recommendations, and Q&A section.
How to Prepare for a Pipeline Meeting
Sales data is the key component of a successful pipeline meeting. You may want to gather metrics like the number of deals, average deal size, win deals, and the average lifetime of a deal in a rep’s pipeline.
If you plan to review sales reps’ performance and coach them, you may want to also look at each rep’s activities before the meeting. Sales pipeline software like Revenue Grid allows you to do that easily.
For example, Revenue Grid gives you details about each rep’s sales activities for a specific time frame on a timeline — all the data is captured automatically. It also displayed how the rep’s performance has improved after the previous meeting so you can know if they act on your feedback.
Collecting these data points helps you develop a solid starting point for your coaching session and know exactly what you should discuss with your reps in the meeting.
Steps for an Effective Sales Pipeline Review Meeting
Step 1: Talk about the purpose of the meeting and key points that will be discussed.
Step 2: Review the current sales pipeline and what sales practices you’re using. Identify which deals are going in the right direction and which ones have problems.
For this step, you may ask your team questions like what changed in a specific deal? How long has it stayed at the current stage? Or how likely is the deal to close? Don’t just rely on your rep’s gut feelings but also take advantage of real-time data to forecast. Asking the right questions guides sales reps and leaders to better understand their leads’ current situation and priority needs.
Step 3: Determine the next steps for the deals that need to be addressed. The more specific the actions, the higher chance you can close those deals.
Step 4: Follow up the pipeline meeting to keep track of sales reps’ actions and guide them through the process.
Now that you’ve known how important it is to have a sales pipeline review meeting. Start working on your review and use Revenue Grid to aid your planning.
With powerful features like pipeline visibility, deal guidance, pipeline signals, and team analytics, you can save a lot of time collecting the data and track reps’ performance. Just a few clicks and everything you need to prepare will be presented in front of you.
