#222 - Leadership Playbook: Armand and Mark Teach You How to Run Pipeline Reviews That Don't Suck

Foreign. Good morning everybody and welcome to this first ever leadership playbook episode of 30 Minutes to Presidents Club. My name is Armand Farouk and I'm here with my co host Mark Kosuglo. And today we are breaking down deal reviews, pipeline reviews, how to comb through a pipe and make sure that every deal that you are having on your team as a leader is buttoned up, tied off, et cetera. Mark, why should people listen?

I think there's no more important meeting in the sales organization on a weekly basis than this deal or pipeline review meeting. What it does is it does a couple things. It helps us understand the data in Salesforce is accurate so we can make data driven decisions without having to go like ask reps to like update Salesforce, you know, because we need to do something. Second thing it does is it helps give the rep a real perspective on how to move deals forward through our sales process. And we can evaluate that mental model and burn new neural pathways that creates new behavior. And the last thing it does is it gives that rep a really awesome to do list that they can do for the rest of the week. And if they do 70, 80% of that to do list, they're going to.

Be an all star rep. And there's only one thing left to do, Mark, and it's a three, a two, a one. Let's ride. Today's show is brought to you by Text Us, which helps you move your deals forward faster. When timing matters, the fastest way to move a feel forward is to avoid getting stuck in the inbox. And so my favorite way to get on a text basis is literally when your prospect requests a demo, just send them a confirmation text saying that you're looking forward to the meeting and that opens the text channel for you to call back on it later. Folks, we put an entire guide on how to revive ghosted deals, Nudge next steps and use texting to keep deals moving forward. With Text Us, check it out. It's free in the show notes. So folks, we're going to go through a couple of different buckets as it pertains to pipeline reviews. Number one, what do you expect pipeline to look like? Number two, when you actually enter one of these pipeline reviews with your reps, which deals should you be focusing on? And then number three, when you're breaking down these deals, what are you asking? What are you asking your rep to the bring to the table, etc, Right? So Mark, you step into a pipeline review and I show you, I'm the rep on your team. I have 300 opportunities, none of them have next steps on them. They're all in stage one, which is discovery. You probably whack me over the head with a baseball bat and you say, armand, and your pipeline should look like this.

This.

What should it look like?

We shouldn't, definitely shouldn't be all stage one. And if we have 300 ops, we're in major trouble because nobody can work 300 ops at one time. So listen, what I'm looking for is pretty simple. I want to understand that you have control over the open deals that you're working. And what I mean by control is you understand where they're at in the buying process using our sales methodology, you understand where you're taking them. And you have a meeting on the books in order to do that. I'm looking for you to do that for every single deal. If you know how to do that on every single deal. And I think a leader that know has reps that know how to do that on every single. Like you sleep well at night, like it makes sense. It's not rocket science.

Mark, when you think about setting up your sales process, you just not just joined Cathin the last 24 months. Right. You probably had to do this for the first time at Catalyst, setting up your A, B, C, D, E sales process. Can you talk to me about like, what does that actually look like? Is it a training that you do? Are you changing putting your sales process and turning those into salesforce stages? How do you actually operate your sales process so that all of your reps know exactly where their deal should fit within a pipeline review?

Yeah. So the first thing you have to decide is like, what? How do you want people to manage deals? I think this is the thing that I found is a gap for most sellers is nobody's ever really taught them how to manage their pipeline and to move it forward. They know how to work a deal, do discovery, that kind of stuff. But like managing your pipeline is managing a group of deals and all moving them forward at the same time. Right. So there's I think, two main ways to do that. One is meeting based deal management, where you're like, hey, what we do is we have a transactional sale and we go from first meeting to demo to value, roi, discussions to close. And we have four meetings. And we used to do that with our SMB business at Outreach and we called it the five decks. If you mastered the five decks, you mastered the five meetings, you could go on.

Right.

The other way is stage based deal management. And stage based means that you set up stages In Salesforce, every stage needs to have exit criteria. That's what does the buyer need to figure out in that stage of the sales cycle in order to move to the next stage and progress the deal forward. And so that's the first thing you have to decide is like how are you going to manage deals? Because most companies have stages in Salesforce but they do meeting based deal management and that is directly in conflict because you can't do that. Like if you have your first meeting, the second meeting isn't the demo. If you do in that, that's a meeting based deal management, not stage based. Stage based is first we got to figure out strong business initiatives and then we have to make sure that we have the org mapped out. Until we do that, we can't move forward. And that means we're probably not going to do a demo unless the demo is to help us get that information. Right. And so the meetings and what you do in the meetings becomes very different. You have very specific exit criteria and stage based deal management that you can repeat. And if you can repeat something, you can practice and master it. And that's why I prefer stage based deal management. But that's what I'm looking for is that's the first thing for the sales methodology man. And then there's ban medic, those are qualification things. There's all this, you know, there's the challenger sale, there's you know, blah blah, blah. Like I combine, I like force management's command of the message. I like Skip Miller's proactive selling. I've combined those together with some of my own stuff. And so that's kind of where I come up with my exit criteria and what to do in each stage and how to communicate that to the customer. But like that's where you got to start.

Yeah. And I think one thing that you're calling out that's really important is that your sales methodology, right. Whether you're using Skip Miller or whether using command of the message, where you're talking about the negative implications of your current business situation, all that stuff, those are oftentimes the ways that you're moving things through stages. But the stages are actually typically unique to the company, the sales cycle, et cetera. So I want to use a version of your question that you used on another episode which is convinced the stubborn annoying sales rep who doesn't want to update my salesforce convinced me to change my behavior here. I remember when I was at Carta we had these really convoluted stage based deal management stages. So I'll give you an example, right? At Pave, I very much did meeting based deal management, which was first meetings, a discovery call. The exit criteria for that discovery call is there's a problem. The second meeting is a demo. At the end of that demo, the exit criteria is that someone agrees to the solution from their it's multi threading power, agrees to the solution. From there it's a proposal, they agree on commercials and from there it's vendor review. Right. And for me that was a chronological series of meetings that sometimes would be iterative. You might have to do two or three discovery calls before you do a demo. Right. But to me those are like the key meetings in a sales cycle versus at Carta they were like, okay, phase one is solution exploration, phase two is value solidification. Phase three is aligning business priorities with people. And I was like, all of these terms that no one understands and like could happen at various different parts of the sales cycle and didn't always happen in a chronological fashion. So how should I think about creating stages that make sense in plain English to my sales reps versus a discovery call and a demo? I know exactly what those things are.

Yeah, I think we can get really crazy with the names. And you know, some people are like, we need to have buyer centric names. Some people we need to have seller centric names. You know what, like just call it stage one. Like it doesn't really matter. That's what everybody's going to call it anyway. So I think that we get overworked on the names. But like, here's how I think about it, is what is the key thing that a customer has to acknowledge or do to get that stage successful? So let's say like stage one, whatever you call it, like for me, and that is do we have a problem they solve? Like, I just need to like, tell me what the problem they solve is. The second thing I need to know is a problem big enough to solve. So the first one is identify the problem. And stage two, what we do is we then quantify the problem to make sure it's big enough to solve. Because it's not big enough to solve, there's no reason to keep going. Right. The next thing is, is will they agree on how to buy? So if we know there's a big enough problem to solve, we have to agree together on like what we're going to do to buy. And then the, my fourth stage is if we make an investment here, do we get our money back? Like, is the investment worth it if we make A decision. And then lastly it says like, can we finalize the contract to get him a customer? Like, that's like you wanted these like, seminal questions that have, there's a lot of nuance to those questions. There's a lot of things to train inside of them. There's other questions that you need to be able to answer as a seller. But like, I want that one key question in each stage that helps the buyer understand. Like, first of all, Armand, you're about, we're in a discovery call. Do you have a problem I solve? If not, like, let's stop talking. Then is the problem big enough? If not, like, let's stop talking. If we can't agree to buy, let's stop talking. Because you need to understand those things and have those things in your. You have to figure those things out as a buyer and make your decisions as a buyer in order to know that the deal needs to move forward.

I love the chronological order that you have those questions in. And now that I think about it, the process that I had was not really meeting based deal management. It was question or stage based deal management thing pretty similar, which was phase one, did they agree to a problem? Phase two, did they agree on a solution to that problem? Phase three, did Power agree on that solution and that problem? Phase four, did they agree on commercials to solve, to pay to solve that problem? And then phase five, did they put contracts behind all of those four agreements? Right. And so for folks, everyone listening, each of us have a five stage sales process that's pretty simple. We'll actually create an attachment that you all can download. You'll be able to see my stages and mark stages and you can build your own based on whatever makes the most sense for you. So that's step one, folks, is you need to identify your sales process and make sure that your reps are having your different deals in the right stages. So you know whether you should be talking about do they have agreement on how to buy? Or if you should be talking about how you can find a big enough problem. So, Mark, let's say that you step into the deal review and all of my pipeline is beautiful. You say, armand, great job. I see your 10 opportunities at different stages. I have some early stage ops, I have some mid stage ops, I have some late stage ops. Where do you dive in first?

So I believe your most important deal is always your biggest deal. So I want every rep to talk about every deal in their pipeline every week with their manager, starting with the biggest deal. But I need to go back for A second, Armand, I don't know if I answered your question. How do I get a rep to change stages? I think I just talked about stages. So can I go back to that real quick? So the purpose of a sales methodology is to help the rep know what to do. And so think about it like this is like, right now, every rep on the planet has some way of thinking about how to get a deal one. And that's like, you know, it's burned into their brain. They develop a system. That's how they do it. Right. And so a lot of times what happens, though, is that process isn't universal enough. It's not comprehensive enough. And you get reps that are kind of lost. And like, they're like, all right, Armand, like, the discovery call went great. They were really happy after the demo. But now I can't seem to, like, get these other people in a meeting to talk through what we need to do next, which is talk it through roi. Well, that's because the buyer isn't ready to go through ROI yet, but that's what you have in your mind to go do. So that's when you get that disconnect. So the way that I like to help reps buy into this is to understand, all right, when your stage is right, your mission's clear. In stage two, we're trying to do two things. Quantify business initiatives and get that idate. That's the implementation date, the day by which they need the value that we could provide them. So now that you know that every time you see in stage two, we have like a. Now we have a little playbook. We have a several little tricks that we can do, several different plays that we can run that help you get those things figured out so that you can move the deal forward. And again, it's repetitive. Every time we get to stage two, we're going to talk about those two things over and over and over. And it gets repetitive. But that's how you create new behaviors through repetition. And then like I said earlier, repetition makes you a master. And so if you want. If the way I set the reps is if you want to know what to do in a stage, then you make the stage right. Look at your roadmap. It tells you what to do, and then you will get good at those specific skills if you do them over and over again. And that's what's going to make you a better seller, and you can own that yourself. And the other thing is, is if our stage data isn't accurate as a company, Then I have difficulty creating fixes for the entire organization that everybody can benefit from. So if I see that we're getting hung up in stage three, going to stage four, I need to look at our process. I need to like, what are we doing? Because if the reps are doing those things and it's not working, then that's on the business and on the leader to figure out. But if everybody's doing their own thing and I say, oh, stage three to stage four doesn't work well, that's because half the reps go from stage three to closed one and the other one, like, nobody uses stage four and five, really. And so now that's the only reason why conversion looks like it sucks. So now I can't use the data to pinpoint where there's bottlenecks and I can't create fixes that the entire organization can do. That's what, as a leader, you need that data to be tight so that you can make sure that you can identify what's going wrong and you can roll out a fix that helps the entire team, not just an individual 100%.

The. The way that I would sell it to my team is pretty similar, which is, look, the reason our pipeline needs to go up to date is because oftentimes you want me to help you in a deal, right? And we can spend all of this time having you bring me through every single interaction that has ever happened in a deal so I can somehow wrap my head around where this thing stands and what you've missed along the way, or you can just happen in the mutually agreed upon stage that we've all agreed upon. For example, at stage three. And I know all we need to focus on are the team wide agreed plays that move a deal from stage three to stage four. For example, at the end of a discovery call, we're always talking about the five minute drill, right? Stage one to stage two is I want to know, do you want to buy? Do you have a problem? If so, great. When? When's your idate or your implementation date? And if so, how? Right? How do you buy? I need to ask those three questions in order that take us from stage one to stage two. But I should not be asking those three questions in stage three to four because I've already mapped a lot of that stuff out. So I love your sense of using the different playbooks to drive deals from three to four and whatnot. And that's how you actually show your reps that you're there to help them in that process.

Yeah, I Mean, you know, it's, it just really stinks when you get into a deal review or a pipeline review and you're reviewing multiple deals and you're there for an hour and you get through four deals because the rep told you a story for 10 or 15 minutes on each deal just so that you could start to provide salient advice. Right. And so that's the difference between a deal strategy call, where we're going to go get deep in a deal and like, really figure it out in a pipeline review. A pipeline review is a high level thing. I want my number one, I have a facilitation guide for running these deal review sessions. Maybe we can share that. And the number one thing at the top, Armand, is no story time. You have to stop reps from telling you stories because they want to tell you the story of the deal. And that is not productive. What's productive is, hey, last week we were in stage two and you told me in your next step that you were going to set a meeting to get this quantified business initiative with this above the line contact. Did you get that meeting? Yes. All right, great. Now let's talk about what we're going to accomplish in that meeting in order to get this move to stage three. Or no, I didn't book the meeting. All right. Are you going after the right person? Did you actually try to get the meeting? Or do we need to try a new strategy because this person isn't the right person and we've been trying for three weeks to get in touch with them and they're just cold now. And so this pipeline review is a high level. Are we moving deals through the pipeline by having a next step that is always tied to accomplishing an exit criteria and then asking, do you have a meeting on the books to do that? Because if you don't, it won't happen.

Bingo. So this starts to go into what do you expect expect reps to bring to the table when reviewing a deal? So my expectation is that we could review any deal in one minute. The way that we would review the deal is we would take those five questions that you had by stage right. Is the problem big enough to solve, is it quantifiable, et cetera. And the deal review would be, give me the one sentence explanation on how we have achieved the exit criteria for each of those stages. And that would bring us to stage three. And let's say the deal is actively in stage three. Next thing I want to know is, what are you doing to get it to stage four? Have you talked to your prospect about that? Is there a meeting on the books to do that? If not, we're going to start talking about how. So I'm curious, Mark, let's say I've brought you up to speed on this deal, right? And I told you what I was supposed to do last week. What are the different questions you can start to ask your reps to problem solve any given deal? My guess is it's probably pretty state dependent. But are there common themes that you're asking your reps in deals in terms of how you're helping them move these deals forward?

I think this is what the ne like a good next step framework takes care of this. And what I mean by that is, is this is how a next step works. A next step is something that you can do within a week that is binary. You can do it or not do it. It's not like, oh, I get them to say they are, they love the demo. That's what a lot of people. Well, my next step is my demo. I'm going to make sure that they, they really see the value of our product. I'm like, that's not a next step. I'm like, what happens if they see value in the product? Well, they would probably book the next meeting to do a workflow interview. All right, then that's your next step is to get the, the nec, the workflow interview. So that's binary. I can ask you if you did that or not and you can only say yes or no. Right. So I want a, something that can be done in a week. I want something that is binary, yes or no. And I want it to be directly tied to the exit criteria that you're trying to accomplish in order to move the deal forward. And so like that next step is what I'm expecting reps to come with to the meeting and seeing that it's aligned to our sales process. And if it's not, that's coaching opportunity. Hey, we're in stage three and we've already done demos. Why are we doing more demos? Yeah, all right, well that's fine to do more demos with leadership. I totally get that. But like, how do we leverage that demo to get the stage three exit criteria completed so we can move to stage four, not just do another demo?

Yeah.

Oh, okay. Well, yeah, all right, so we're gonna get them to agree to a mutual action plan. All right, let's, let's do this. Let's show at the beginning before we do the demo, let's show them a mutual action Plan and be like, here's this demo, here's the date. You need the value by. Da da da da. Can we agree, like, if we do this demo, we can do this meeting next because that way we get that our timeline set so we can deliver the value when you need it. And we start the meeting like the demo like that versus starting the demo with the typical like, hey, let's get into why we're talking here right now. Totally. So you can leverage different things to do the exit criteria. If you know what the exit criteria are and you're consistently coaching to them.

Correct. And this is why I understand why a traditional meeting based on sales process is something that you're less a fan of. Because there are a lot of different ways to get someone to agree to a problem. Right. Or to agree to a solution. It doesn't have to be the same type of demo every single time. And it would always drive me crazy. Would set next steps and they would have. They would take so much pride in having next steps on every single one of their opportunities, where they've touched every single opportunity in their pipeline. They have another meeting with every OP in their pipeline. But then I ask them, okay, let's say this demo goes, well, what are you going to ask for at the end of it? And they don't have an answer. And so pipeline reviews are oftentimes less about what's happening in the meat and potatoes of the meeting, but it's more, what are you using that meeting for? In order to determine what you can ask that prospect for at the end of the meeting, at the beginning. And at the end you're going to say, hey, the purpose of this meeting is so that we can demonstrate that you said you have these problems. We're going to solve these problems with a demo. And we want the demo to serve as the purpose to show you that we weren't lying when we said we could solve these problems. And at the end, we're going to have a conversation on whether or not we have solved this problem for you. And that will determine if having a next step at all or not.

So listen, I think that meetings, the number one gift you can give a rep is two questions for a meeting. One is, what are you trying to accomplish in this meeting? And two is what are you going to ask for at the end of it? And most reps don't go into a meeting thinking about that. They think about executing on the meeting. I need to do a great day demo. I need to present a great proposal. I need to really help them understand the ROI that needs to stay. Right. But what you need to do is be like, all right, well, what are you trying to accomplish with the roi? What are you trying to get them to agree to? What are you trying. And then the next thing is, is what are you going to ask for at the end? And see, when you define those two things, you can drive towards them versus just being like, well, I had a great meeting. We went through roi. Like, I don't know why they won't call me. Get on another thing, it seemed like it went really well. They seem really happy. They said that they thought it made sense. Like, why aren't they? Well, that's because you didn't drive to something that you were supposed to do in that meeting, and then you didn't ask for anything afterwards. You told them you'd follow them up with an email later or whatever.

Bingo.

So you just gotta always have that shot clock going. My buddy Alex Kramer says that. Have the shot clock going, 5 minutes left in the meeting, gotta start talking about the next meeting.

That's right. So my guess is, Mark, once your reps get pretty good at this stuff, in my experience, deal reviews actually get a little bit better. Boring. With your best reps, because they're like, these are the three exit criteria I've hit. These are the next three that I need to hit. You know, I land my forecast, I'm going to tell you what the risks are in the deal. And there are some times where I'm just like, okay, you know, what you're doing is that the ideal end outcome is do you want pipeline reviews to basically be. Your reps are reviewing their own pipeline and you're just saying, yep, you got it.

Yeah. So I think you can. If you do it consistently, it can take two or three months, but you can get to a state where people come into the deal review meeting with, all right, here's my 20 deals. I got a next step for every single one of them. They're all aligned. I got my meeting, I go, I got meetings with 12 of them. I'm trying to get meetings with the other eight, blah, blah, blah. And it all makes sense. And I had a rep, one of my first reps at outreach, got to that state where there's just no point in us going over it anymore. The way his brain worked was exactly how he wanted to work it with the sales process. And he was able to get 70 to 80% of his next steps done every single week. So then what? You get to start working on With a rep then is you start to get working on the. The next layer, the stuff that makes you a superstar. And so, hey, let's go deep into this deal now. Or, hey, let's talk about how we can compress this deal cycle by combining two steps because you've mastered them both. Let's try to get two done in a meeting instead of one. And so you can start to do that edge stuff that really adds a ton of expertise and, like, accelerate someone's sales career versus just like, you know, learning the basis. Like, the different is. The analogy I'd use is getting good at the deal review is like getting good at dribbling with your right and left hands. Like, when you're good at that. Like, okay, I can dribble with both hands. And when I coach basketball before I, you know, what did you really doing? Like, between the legs, spin moves behind the back. I wanted you to have solid dribbling with each hand. And then we would do drills after we had that on how to get fancy. And I think a lot of reps try to get fancy before they get the. The fundamentals set. So, like, let's just pound the ball with the right hand till we can do that. Pound the ball with our left hand. We can do that. And then we'll mix in some spin dribbles. It's.

I forget what the saying was, but they say that the experts or the masters of the craft, they've mastered the rules so much that they're allowed to break the rules, right? You master the rules, you learn the rules so that you can break the rules. And what your deal reviews will oftentimes evolve to with your top reps are like, okay, you're down in this game, right? Or the team is down in this game and you're Michael Jordan, right? We got to come up with some crazy plays that we can use to get these deals to skip two or three. Not skip two or three stages, but move these deals through two or three stages. Or you want to get into triple accelerator territory, right? Let's talk about how we take this deal from 100k deal and turn it into a 250k deal.

Possibly.

But you can only do that if you know the drill that you're supposed to be running to bring a deal from point A to point Z in the first place. Otherwise, you're just fumbling all over yourself and you're trying to do between the legs. But you haven't even learned how to dribble ball.

Totally. Totally.

So, Mark, I'm curious Last two bits on this. Number one, how do you keep track of all of these deals? And the reason for that is you're probably doing reviews with managers and reps and all over the place. And I remember my reps would be walking me through some of these deals. I was like, I know we talked about this once, but, like, we got to start from zero, right? Because I don't remember this after the seventh deal review that I've done today. How do I deal with that?

Yeah, I think that that just you bake it into the process. Meaning, like, I don't need to remember everything about every deal. What I need to remember is, is what is the next step you logged last week, and did you accomplish that or not? And then if you did, what is the next step that you're asking, you're trying to do this week? And does it align to our sales process? And if you didn't get the next step done, do we still agree that that's the same thing to do? And if we didn't get it done, why not? And then over a period of time, let's say three or four weeks of not getting that done, we either need. We're doing the wrong. Doing it with the wrong person, we're doing it the wrong way, or we need to make sure that we change our strategy. Or maybe this isn't a deal. And so, like, that's what I think that you really get into. You know, I don't. I remember when I had eight reps at outreach, I did this every single week with every single one of them. And I just don't. I didn't need to know the. All of the details of the deal. I just needed to know, are you thinking about how to move deals forward correctly? And then once you knew that, now I can get into, like, more of the nuances like we just talked about.

Bingo. And again, it goes full circle. If a deal is sitting in stage three, there's an implicit agreement. We've talked about stage one and two being achieved. So we don't need to remember every detail. We just need to remember what it takes to bring it from stage three to stage four. The last thing that I want to ask you on this, Mark, is you talked about starting with the biggest deal first. And my guess is there are times where you can't get through every deal. So you go from the biggest deal, Right. Do you just work your way backwards in terms of smaller and smaller deals?

Right.

Do you go late stage to early stage? How do I actually decide where I focus My time when I've got a rep who has a big fat pipeline.

Yeah, I just start at the top. And the thing, the. One of the main things I train managers on is pace, and they'll let the PACE get out of control and they'll only get through seven deals instead of 20 deals. The only reason you can't get through 20 deals is you're not paying attention to pace. So if all I'm asking you, Armand, is, hey, first of all, we have a constructed, templated sentence that you say about every deal. Armand, I see right now that 30 minutes to President's Club is a $30,000 deal that you're anticipating closing at the end of November. That's in stage two, which means that we're trying to get quantified business initiatives in an idate. And right now it's in best case, which means that we have a problem and we have a timeline when they're going to buy, which means we. And then it's in yellow risk, which means you're afraid it's going to push from the time that they've told you. Is that right? Because that's what your data's saying. And you construct that sentence for every deal every manager does, and if they say yes, it's right, you move on. If they say no, it's. You correct the data. Then you go, okay, let's look at our next step. Did you do this last week or not? And then, you know, then we're back into our next step stuff and like that. The only reason you don't get through deals is pace. I used, like, this one rep that first mastered it outreach. He'd have 35 to 40 deals in his pipeline. We get through every single one of them every single week.

Amazing.

If you need more time on a deal, schedule a separate call and go deep on it. But don't this, this is not that meeting.

No story time. Ancillary nonsense about the reactions in the discovery call, what the prospect's face looked like. There are all these answ ancillary things, and you should be focusing on the exit criteria at each stage. So, folks, to recap, there are a couple key pieces of doing a good pipeline review. Number one, you need to have your sales process mapped out into key stages with exit criteria by stage. Number two, you need to have plays that you can use and train your team on to move deals between those stages. Number three, when it comes to what your reps need to bring to the table, number one, they need to have all these deals in the right Stages. Number two, they need to be able to explain what has been accomplished in each stage, but also the next step they plan to take to move that deal through the next set of exit criteria. And then lastly, number four, your role as a manager is to review the next step they agreed to take last week and if it didn't get accomplished, brainstorm and ask questions around how we can make sure that that does happen or if this is the next step we should be taking at all. Mark, is there anything I missed before we wrap?

The only thing you missed is a lot of people are like, that sounds really regimented, sharp, a little micromanagey. When do you check in on the person? And that's why you cannot conflate one on ones with deal reviews. And so that's how I leave people is if you don't have every other week one on one where you check on the heart of the person, check their energy, ask how they're doing, work on career development and things like that, you're missing out. And what a lot of people do is they try to do a one on one that turns into a deal review and they do both crappy. And now the rep is like, this is my worst meeting of the week. So one meeting a week on deal review. If you can do it in 30 minutes, great. Takes you an hour, that's fine too. It's the most important deal of the. Our most important meeting of the entire week in the sales organization. And then you need to have like at least in every other week check in on people and form those deeper relationships.

To your point on pacing, the most awkward thing in the world is going through an intense 30 minute deal review and then being like, okay, let's do the one on one time. How are you? It just doesn't work, folks. All right, folks, that's your pipeline review toolkit, playbook, and in the show notes, go check out two things. Number one, we have a stage by stage guide. I'll include my stages and Mark's stages in there. And then number two, we have a facilitation guide for deal reviews as well that Mark will be supplying. Probably roll them up into one big resource for you all. Go get in the show notes. And if you like this playbook, why don't you go shoot Mark a nice DM and let him know. All right, peace folks.