Guide
The pipeline review, done properly.
A pipeline review should tell you what is real, not what is hoped. This guide covers the questions to ask deal by deal, the patterns to look for across a team, and how to tell seller belief from customer evidence before the forecast goes out.
Free Trugap Report on your top commit deal. No card, no setup.
The purpose
A review is an inspection, not a status update.
Most pipeline reviews are readouts. The seller talks through the CRM fields, the manager asks about the close date, and everyone moves on. The deal sounds healthy because the person telling the story believes it.
A useful review does something harder. It separates what the seller believes from what the customer has actually said, done or confirmed. Belief is not worthless, but it is not evidence, and forecasts built on belief break late, when there is no time left to fix them.
Deal by deal
Eight questions that expose the gap.
Ask these of every deal that matters. The answer is only strong when it comes from the customer, not from the seller's reading of the situation.
Problem
Has the customer described the problem in their own words, or are we repeating ours?
Impact
Has the customer put a cost or value on solving it? Who agreed that figure?
Buyer
Has the person who controls the budget engaged directly, not just been named?
Champion
Is someone inside acting on our behalf, or do they just like us?
Decision
Do we know how and when the decision will actually be made, and by whom?
Competition
Do we know what we are up against, including the customer doing nothing?
Process
Are procurement, legal and security steps mapped, started and owned?
Momentum
What has the customer done since the last review? Action from them, not from us.
Class every answer by its strength: verified by the customer, supported by credible signals, assumed by the seller, or missing entirely. The assumed and missing answers are where your forecast risk lives.
Across the team
The patterns that hide in a full pipeline.
Reviewed one deal at a time, every story is plausible. Across ten sellers and forty deals, the same habits show up again and again. These are the four worth looking for first.
Stage inflation
Deals sitting in late stages on seller confidence alone, with early-stage evidence underneath.
Champion comfort
Sellers reporting a friendly contact as a champion when nobody inside is acting.
Close date drift
Dates that slip a month at a time with no customer-owned reason for the new date.
Quiet competition
Deals marked as no competition when the real rival is the customer doing nothing.
Trugap's Team Intelligence view is built for exactly this: every deal inspected against the same evidence standard, so the patterns are visible without sitting through forty readouts. See it on a sample pipeline →
Cadence
How often to review, and at what depth.
Weekly, per deal
Fifteen minutes on the deals that matter. What changed, what the customer did, what is assumed.
Monthly, across the team
Step back from individual deals. Look for the patterns above and where coaching is needed.
Quarterly, on the forecast
Test every commit deal against its evidence before the number goes up the chain.
Start with the deal you believe in most.
Run a free Trugap Report on your top commit deal before your next review. If the evidence changes how you read it, bring the rest of the pipeline.