The best sales review I’ve ever seen had no pipeline interrogation.

No deal-by-deal dissection. No uncomfortable silences while a rep scrolled through their CRM.

Just 3 questions. And the team walked out ready to sell.

Here’s what I’ve observed in over 20 years of coaching sales teams at Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, EY, KPMG, and Workday:

Most weekly reviews are not strategy sessions. They are status updates dressed up as accountability.

They measure your team’s activity. Not customer progress.

And there’s a world of difference between the two.

These 3 questions fix it, by shifting your review from activity tracking to customer progress. Here’s how.

Question 1: What acknowledgments did you receive from your customers this week?

Start there.

Begin with what’s working.

This question reveals three things immediately:

• Whether your customers are finding real value in the relationship.
• Whether your team’s engagement style is landing effectively.
• Whether customers feel safe enough to vocalize their actual needs.

The answers also surface hidden levers – new entry points, untapped relationships, and momentum you can build on to go deeper into accounts.

It also sets the tone. You are not building a culture of fear. You are building a culture of learning.

Question 2: What actions did your customers take last week and what will they take next week?

This one catches teams off guard every time.

Because they walk in prepared to talk about what they did.

What calls they made. What decks they sent. What follow-ups they logged.

And none of that is the point.

Real progress is not measured by your team’s busy work. It is measured by customer movement.

Did the customer share new information?

• Did they introduce a new stakeholder? 
• Did they request a follow-up? 
• Did they push for a faster timeline or a slower one?

These are the signals that tell you where the deal actually is.

And when a rep cannot answer this question, it surfaces something important: the blindspot where the deal is stuck.

Question 3: What should we do to help the customer move to the next stage of their buying cycle?

Notice the shift in ownership.

Not “what will you do next” 

but “what should we do together to help the customer.”

This question prompts your team to think strategically about making the customer’s decision effortless.

• What information does the customer still need? 
• What concern have they not voiced yet? 
• What objection are they sitting with?

It moves your team from reactive responders to proactive guides.

And it moves you, as the manager,  from interrogator to coach.

You still track your pipeline. You still measure activity.

But now you are also tracking what truly drives deals forward: customer progress.

The beauty of this approach is that it expands accountability.

Try these 3 questions in your next sales huddle. Notice how the energy shifts. From defending activity to strategizing customer success.

Which of these 3 questions would shift the most in your weekly reviews?

Organizations hire us to build their next generation of leaders, double or triple their large deals, and build a significant pipeline to secure their future.

Our clients include Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, EY, KPMG, PwC, Tata, and Workday.

And if you’re skeptical, good. You should be.

So here’s your next step: test drive it.

→ Visit my LinkedIn profile and click Send Message. 

→ Send me one question about your pipeline or your people. 

→ I’ll send you a 60-second video with a fresh, actionable perspective.

No catch. Absolutely confidential. Just a straight answer from 20 years of work and $3B+ in pipeline built across the world’s leading organisations.

*** 

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