Cookbook
Run the Monday pipeline pass
The weekly review, done as one conversation. The point is not the list. It is that everything you decide while reading it lands before you close the tab.
The situation
Monday morning. In a traditional CRM this is a saved view you scroll, a set of decisions you make in your head, and a promise to update the records later that you will not keep. The gap between reviewing and recording is where a CRM's data goes to die.
What must be true when you are done
- You have looked at every open deal, largest first.
- You know which ones nobody has touched, separately from which ones are just early.
- Every decision you made while reading is in the workspace: stages moved, reasons recorded, follow-ups created.
Open the review
You
Monday pass. Show me open deals biggest first, and separately anything nobody has touched in two weeks. Then wait, I will go through them with you.
| Deal | Value |
|---|---|
| Halden Systems rollout | 9,600 |
| Meridian Freight rollout | 4,800 |
| Brightline Foods rollout | 2,400 |
| Northwind Trading rollout | 1,250 |
The two questions are deliberately separate. "Biggest first" is about attention and "nobody has touched this" is about neglect, and a deal can easily be one without being the other. The quiet list is the one that finds the deal you have stopped thinking about, which is never the largest.
Decide out loud
This is the part that makes the pass worth doing in a conversation rather than a view. You say what happened; the record changes as you say it.
You
Halden signed on Friday. Move it to Won, note that procurement approved the revised scope on the call, and remind me tomorrow to send the countersigned order form.
Agent
Three records, one sentence, and none of it depended on you remembering to go and do it afterwards. The stage move sets the status by itself, because the status is a consequence of the stage rather than a second field to keep in step.
Note what was stored from the call: your summary. Indraft holds no transcript, no recording, and no attachment, so what goes in is the sentence you would have said in standup anyway.
Work down the list
Keep going in the same voice. The useful move is to say the decision rather than the operation.
You
Meridian has gone quiet since the proposal, chase them Thursday. Northwind is not real this quarter, push the close date to next quarter and tell me why I thought it was closing.
That last clause is the one worth stealing. Asking why a deal was ever forecast for this quarter turns the review into a check on your own judgement, and the answer is in the record's history rather than your memory.
Verify the pass
- Ask for the recent changes. Everything you decided should be there, attributed to your agent, with the time. If a decision is missing it did not happen.
- Ask for the quiet list again. The deals you acted on have left it. The ones still on it are the ones you skipped, which is a useful thing to see before you close the tab.
Run it again
Weekly, and it gets faster. The first pass is long because it is also a clean-up; by the third it is ten minutes, because the only deals that need discussion are the ones that moved.