What to ask in a sales review meeting

Every second Saturday you sit with the sales team, and every second Saturday you hear the same things: visits made, quotations sent, the market is slow. You walk out knowing nothing you did not know on Friday. The fault is in the questions, which ask for effort when you need movement. A review that works runs in five slots. Did last time's promises happen? What changed on each open deal? What was lost, and why? Who is each stalled deal waiting on? What will each person do before you meet again?

How should the hour run?

Give the meeting a clock. Without one, the first person to speak takes forty minutes and the last gets two.

1. First ten minutes: last meeting's promises. Read each person's dated next steps aloud from the notes. Did the call happen? Was the sample sent? This opening tells the team that the notes are read.
2. Next fifteen: what moved. Only deals that changed stage since last time. Which deal moved, and what did the buyer do that made it move? A buyer who sent a specification has done something. So has one who introduced the accounts person or asked for a delivery date. A buyer who said "send it, we will see" has not.
3. Next fifteen: what was lost or dropped. What reason did the buyer give, in their words? What do you think the real one was? Write both down.
4. Next ten: what is stuck, and on whom. For each stalled deal, name the person it is stuck on. The buyer, our price, our delivery date, or us?
5. Last ten: what you need from me. Ask this every time and expect the answer to sometimes be uncomfortable. Then each person states one dated next step.

What do I do with the answers that end the conversation?

Three replies turn up in most reviews, and each one closes a door unless you follow it.

Price. True often enough to be dangerous. Ask: compared with whom, and did the buyer say so? A buyer who names a rival and a figure has given you information. A buyer who said "too costly" and then stopped answering has told you about your follow-up, not your price.

Waiting for approval. Ask who signs, and whether you have met that person. If the only contact is a clerk or a store-keeper, the deal may be waiting on nobody.

Will confirm. Ask for the date the buyer named. No date means no commitment.

What does it look like in a real room?

Here is an invented case. A namkeen and papad maker in Bikaner sells through eleven distributors across Rajasthan and Gujarat, with three area salespeople. The owner's old review asked each of them for the month's sales and the visits made. Everyone had visited. Sales were flat and nobody knew why.

At the first meeting with the clock, the owner added one question to the movement slot. Which distributor has gone longer than usual without ordering? One salesperson said the Jaipur distributor had not reordered in six weeks, against a usual gap of three. It was "stuck on the distributor". Pressed on who exactly, the salesperson admitted not having rung since a scheme had been announced.

The scheme was a retailer incentive the owner had promised for the festival stock. It had been drafted, but nobody had told the distributors the terms. When the owner reached the last slot and asked what the team needed from the owner, the answer was the scheme letter, which had sat on the owner's desk for six days. The owner's own delay was the stuck item. The letter was signed that afternoon, the salesperson rang the Jaipur distributor with the terms, and an order came the following week, though smaller than the usual one because the festival stock had already been bought elsewhere.

Nobody was blamed. The question that found the gap was about the distributor's gap, which can be read from a dispatch register, while the question that failed before was about effort.

How do I ask about a loss without a blame session?

Separate the loss from the person. Ask for the buyer's words first and write them down before anyone interprets them. Then ask what would have had to be different for this buyer to say yes.

Keep one line per loss in a shared list, in the same wording each time. After a few meetings the list sorts itself. If most lines say "late quotation", you have a speed problem. If most say a rival's name, you have a price or product problem. If most say nothing at all, you have a follow-up problem. These are three different jobs.

What should I stop asking?

Stop opening with activity. Calls and visits are fine as supporting detail. They are not the subject.

Stop asking "how confident are you?" with no scale. Replace it with "what has the buyer done that shows they will buy?"

Stop raising a struggling person's deals in front of colleagues. Take that one aside afterwards, and say so, so nobody feels singled out in the room.

Our post on a win-loss review goes deeper into losses, and the guide to cleaning a pipeline helps when the list is too untidy to answer the first question.

When does this format not fit?

Skip the meeting if you are the only salesperson. You need a look at your own records once a quarter, not a room. Change it for a team that sells very large, slow orders. There the hour will go on three or four deals, so choose them beforehand and ask the same questions of each.

The format also fails without a record. If nobody can say which deals are open, the first job is a one-row-per-quotation sheet with a last-contact date. A shared sheet is enough to start.

Keeping the questions on the table

Print the five slots and the dated steps from last time. Begin the next meeting by reading those steps back. People tend to prepare better once they see the notes are used.

To talk through your own team's meeting, tell us what you need; how reviews fit the rest of running a sales team is covered under sales.