Latest / Sales Leadership with Fexingo: Quota Carriers, Sales Managers, and Revenue Teams / Deal Review Meetings That Actually Improve Win Rates
Transcript
- Lucas: You know that feeling when you walk into a weekly deal review and the rep says, 'Yeah, it's still moving, nothing new' — and you just nod and move on? Luna: Oh, I've lived that. It's the most expensive ten minutes of the week because nothing actually happens. Lucas: Exactly. And most sales leaders know it's broken, but they keep doing it because, well, you have to review the pipeline. But what if the problem isn't the review itself — it's that you're reviewing the wrong deals in the wrong way? Luna: So what's the fix? I'm guessing you have a specific example. Lucas: I do. A mid-market SaaS company called CloudEdge — about 40 reps, selling to HR departments. Their win rate had flatlined around 28 percent for two years. Their VP of Sales, a woman named Priya, decided to blow up the deal review format entirely. Luna: What'd she do differently? Lucas: She banned reviewing every deal. Instead, the only deals that get airtime are ones in one of three buckets: stalled for more than two weeks, late-stage with a risk flag, or recently lost. Everything else gets a quick pipeline health score and that's it. Luna: That's a pretty big shift. How did the reps react? Lucas: Mixed at first. Some reps loved it because they weren't sitting through 20 updates on deals they didn't care about. But some managers worried they'd lose visibility. Priya's counter was: if you need visibility, look at the CRM dashboard. The meeting is for judgment, not data entry. Luna: Right — the meeting should be where you apply experience, not where you read numbers off a screen. Lucas: Exactly. And she introduced three questions for every deal that gets reviewed. First: What has changed since last week? Second: What is the one unknown that, if answered, would move this forward? Third: If we had to decide today, would we invest more time or walk away? Luna: That third question is brutal. Most reps never want to walk away. Lucas: Right, and that's the point. Priya told me that in the first month, they killed 12 deals that had been sitting in the pipeline for over six months. Deals that were never going to close but gave a false sense of pipeline health. And once they cleared those out, their forecast accuracy went up almost immediately. Luna: What happened to win rate? Lucas: Over two quarters, it went from 28 percent to 34.5 percent. That's a 23 percent improvement. And it wasn't because they got better at closing — it was because they stopped spending time on deals that were never going to close. Luna: So the reps' time got reallocated to the deals that actually had a shot. Lucas: Exactly. And the managers' coaching got sharper too, because they were only looking at the deals that needed real judgment, not the ones on autopilot. Luna: I can see this working for shorter sales cycles. But what about enterprise deals that take nine months? Stalled for two weeks is normal. Lucas: Great question. Priya ran into that too. Her adjustment was: for enterprise deals, the stall threshold is six weeks, not two. And the late-stage risk flag is triggered by specific events — like the champion leaving the company, or a competitor getting a meeting with the economic buyer. Luna: So the framework scales if you adjust the parameters. Lucas: Right. And the key is you define those thresholds before the meeting, not during it. Otherwise you're back to making it up as you go. Luna: Let's talk about the lost deals bucket. What's the point of reviewing a deal you already lost? Lucas: Priya's philosophy was that a lost deal is the cheapest coaching moment you'll ever get. The rep's guard is down, the stakes are gone, and you can have an honest conversation about what actually happened. The question she uses is: At what point did we lose, and what was the signal we missed? Luna: And did that lead to changes? Lucas: Yeah. They found a pattern — in about 40 percent of lost deals, the rep had missed a shift in the buyer's timeline. The buyer had said 'we're looking at Q3' but then went dark, and the rep didn't re-qualify. So they built a simple trigger in their CRM: if a deal goes more than 10 days without an activity logged, it gets flagged. Luna: That's a process fix that came directly from reviewing losses. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the kind of thing that never surfaces in a standard pipeline review because everyone's too busy updating stage probabilities. Luna: I want to push back on one thing though. If you're only reviewing problem deals, aren't you reinforcing a negativity bias? The reps who are doing well never get airtime. Lucas: Priya had an answer for that too. Once a month, they do a 'win spotlight' — 15 minutes where a rep walks through a deal they just closed and explains the key decisions. But it's not a celebration lap. The rep has to answer: what was the moment you thought you might lose, and what did you do? Luna: So it's still coaching, just framed around success. Lucas: Right. And it turns out the reps learn more from hearing a peer describe a near-loss than from hearing a manager give theory. Luna: That makes sense. So if a sales leader wanted to try this starting next Monday, what's the first step? Lucas: Two things. One: define your three buckets with concrete thresholds. Don't make them vague. Write down: stalled means X days without a next step, late-stage risk means we're in the final two steps but we don't have access to the economic buyer, etc. Two: send the agenda to the team 24 hours before the meeting with the specific deals that will be reviewed. Luna: So the rep comes prepared, not surprised. Lucas: Exactly. And if a rep doesn't have a deal in any of the three buckets that week, they don't present. That alone sends a message: we're only using this time for the deals that need it. Luna: I really like this. It's a structural change, not a motivational speech. Lucas: That's the thing about sales leadership — most of the leverage is in the structure, not the pep talks. Luna: And speaking of structure, we try to build this show the same way — focused, no fluff, no ads. If these conversations have helped you think differently about your team or your own selling, you can support that choice at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small way to keep this ad-free and independent. Lucas: Yeah, we've never run a single ad on this show, and we'd like to keep it that way. If you've gotten value from an episode — especially one that gave you a framework you actually used — that link is a simple way to say thanks. No pressure, just an option. Luna: Alright, back to deal reviews. Lucas, you mentioned that Priya also changed who runs the meeting. Can you talk about that? Lucas: Right. Traditionally, the sales manager runs the review. Priya rotated that responsibility. Each week, a different rep facilitates. The manager is in the room, but they're not leading. The rep running the meeting has to keep time, enforce the three-question format, and push for answers. Luna: That's smart. It builds facilitation skills and makes the reps own the process. Lucas: And it changes the power dynamic. When a peer is asking 'should we invest more time or walk away?', the answer tends to be more honest than when the boss asks it. Luna: I can see that. There's less posturing. Lucas: Exactly. And the manager gets to observe how the reps think under pressure — which is great coaching data for one-on-ones later. Luna: So the deal review becomes a leadership development tool, not just a pipeline scrub. Lucas: That's the ideal. Priya told me that within three months, the quality of the conversation in those meetings was noticeably sharper. Reps started pre-calling which deals they thought should be killed before the meeting even started. Luna: That's a sign the culture shifted. Lucas: It is. And it didn't require a new CRM or a bigger budget. Just a change in what you do with the hour you already have.