FOUNDER’S GUIDE TO B2B SALES DEAL REVIEWS Winning deals, particularly in the enterprise, is complex because it involves: • Multiple buyer roles: user, champion, economic buyer, approver, IT/standards, procurement • Multiple competitors: incumbents, hyper-scalers, startups • Defined process: RFI, RFP, demo, presentation, proof of concept, committee, purchasing A deal review is a meeting where sales management and interested peers come together to learn about a deal and focus on generating ideas to win it • Example problems: “We know that competitor X will say Y,” or “we know that buying from a startup is a major concern for the CFO” • Frequent problem: We don’t know what we don’t know – the peer group can help a seller to identify important missing information and generate ideas on how to get it Deal reviews should happen on-demand, called by a seller or their manager when they feel they could benefit from the assistance of the team. Keep deal reviews positive and focused on winning to ensure that sellers will call them when needed. ONE MEETING OR THREE? With the good intention of reducing meetings, some sales managers try to combine pipeline scrubs, forecast calls, and deal reviews into a single meeting. This is almost always a mistake. Pipeline scrubs should be long, disciplined, systematic walk-throughs. Given the length of the meeting, it can be segmented by region so the entire team doesn’t need to sit through the entire scrub. Forecast calls should be used to quickly run through the numbers. • What are you calling? • Where’s it coming from? • How did it change? • What help do you need to keep things moving? Deal reviews should be opt-in meetings where people come together to help. The seller should spend 10 to 30 minutes discussing each deal by outlining the situation. The team, consisting of management and peers, should then work together to find the best path to victory. Keep these meetings and their functions separate and you won’t regret it. SPRING 2023 .28