If nothing changes after the meeting, you held a reporting session.

I've probably spent more hours in pipeline reviews than I care to remember.

Some were valuable.

Some felt like we were reading the CRM out loud to each other. 😁

There's a difference.

In the better ones, I rarely walked out with exactly the same view of my pipeline that I had when I walked in.

Sometimes an opportunity I thought was strong suddenly looked a little less certain.

Sometimes a deal I was struggling with got unstuck because somebody around the table saw something I didn't.

Sometimes we realized I needed help from an executive, someone in delivery, or another part of the organization.

And occasionally, the most valuable outcome was admitting that a deal probably didn't belong in the forecast at all.

Something changed.

That's what I've come to believe a pipeline review is supposed to do.

Today we have considerably better technology than we had during much of my career.

We can see pipeline by seller, account, stage, geography, quarter and just about any other dimension we want.

That's enormously useful.

But I've also seen how easily visibility can be mistaken for management.

Put a dashboard on the screen.

Review the opportunities.

Discuss a few close dates.

Ask whether everyone is comfortable with the forecast.

Move on to the next meeting.

We reviewed the pipeline.

But did we actually change anything?

That's the question I find myself asking.

Because if an opportunity was questionable when we entered the meeting and it's still questionable when we leave—with exactly the same assumptions, exactly the same approach and exactly the same unanswered questions—I'm not sure what we accomplished.

The best pipeline conversations I remember weren't necessarily the most comfortable ones.

People challenged my thinking.

Sometimes they saw weaknesses in an opportunity that I didn't want to see.

Other times, they helped me see a path forward that I hadn't considered.

That's management.

And there's an important leadership dimension to this as well.

You want people willing to say:

“I don't think this deal is as strong as I thought it was.”

That's valuable information.

If the environment teaches people that admitting uncertainty gets them punished, they'll eventually learn to bring certainty to the meeting.

Unfortunately, the customer doesn't necessarily cooperate with the story we're telling ourselves.

I'd rather discover a problem while I still have time and options than discover it when the quarter is almost over.

Maybe that's the simplest test of a pipeline review.

Did we leave with a more honest understanding of the business—and a better chance of changing the outcome?

If yes, the meeting probably did its job.

If everyone simply updated their numbers and went back to work, we may have reviewed the pipeline.

I'm not sure we managed it.