How to review deal health
These five health indicators give you a starting point for knowing whether a deal is on track. Run through this checklist before your next one-on-one or pipeline review to decide where to spend your time.
1. Identify next steps
Make sure there is a clear, firm future commitment in the form of a phone call or in-person meeting.
What does the communication timeline look like going forward? Is there a next meeting on the calendar?
Consistent communication throughout the deal cycle is a strong indicator of likelihood to close, so having scheduled next steps is a critical factor when assessing overall deal health.
Checking your CRM or asking reps for updates on each deal is time-consuming and leaves room for missing information and bias. To help with this, the deal board has a dedicated column showing when and where next steps have been set. This gives you a quick, team-wide snapshot of where every deal stands in terms of both current communication and future calls. Use it to see all scheduled calls in one place and then choose to dig deeper into specific accounts when necessary.
2. Review activity levels
If the activity timeline looks sparse, ask your rep whether communication is happening elsewhere.
How frequent are touchpoints on the account? A healthy deal has frequent touchpoints from both parties.
Look at how much activity is occurring on the deal board to get a full view of how your team is communicating across active deals. Research suggests email velocity is a key indicator of likelihood to close. Look for at least 8 emails per week on healthy deals, with 3 coming from the prospect.
3. Understand multi-threading
Identify whether multiple customer contacts are engaged in the deal.
How many people are involved in the conversation?
A sign of a healthy deal is seeing that a rep is in touch with multiple contacts at a company. This multi-threaded approach reduces risk if your main contact gets promoted, leaves, or is no longer part of the buying process. Your rep should be able to name everyone involved and describe the role they play.
Multi-threading helps you build a base of influencers, including anyone who will have input in the decision-making process. Winning deals typically have multiple champions.
You can also use deal warnings to surface deals that do not have enough people involved.
4. Confirm access to power
Check that each deal has not only multiple stakeholders engaged but also the key decision-makers. Deal warnings can also surface deals that lack sufficient power.
Are you in touch with the right people? Deals should include the person who recommends the purchase decision and the person who approves it.
A deal can have frequent communication and concrete next steps scheduled and still be at risk. If reps are not talking to decision-makers, the volume of touchpoints has little impact.
For example: a late-stage deal forecasted to close this month has a healthy level of engagement and good back-and-forth, but all communication has been with enthusiastic junior team members or people on a team whose budget does not cover the purchase. That would be cause for concern.
The activity timeline shows you who your rep has engaged with. Armed with that knowledge, a deal that might have been at risk becomes an opportunity to coach your rep on how to reach the right people.
5. Dive into what is being communicated
Bring yourself up to speed quickly by drilling into the latest calls and email conversations.
Once you know that communication is happening, dig into what is actually being discussed. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing activity in an account only to find a prospect declining over and over again.
A good level of engagement, solidified next steps, and contact with the right people can still create a false sense of security if you do not look at the content. Make sure reps are having high-value conversations, handling objections effectively, and managing risk along the way.