The typical deal review takes an hour and still misses the risk. This one takes a minute, because it reads a three-sentence deal story and seven checks on what the buyer has actually done.
A 60-second deal review swaps the hour-long "walk me through this one" for two parts: a three-sentence deal story (the change, the named project and its date, and the differentiator the buyer confirmed) and seven evidence checks on what the buyer has done. It's fast because the evidence is specific, and the earliest unconfirmed check tells the manager exactly what to coach next.
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Short, practical frameworks for executive messaging, business cases, multithreading, and sales enablement.
In just 60 seconds, I can tell you if a deal's going to get a decision or get deleted. Which is roughly 59 minutes faster than the typical deal review.
You've probably sat through the typical one. The VP says, "Walk me through this one, it's big for our quarter," and the rep starts on the play-by-play. The manager adds something to sound on top of it, the rep goes into more detail, and the VP drifts back to their inbox until they finally look up and ask, "Okay, so when are we meeting their exec?" Then somebody notices it's been an hour.
When I say it should take a minute, the pushback is usually some version of, "But you don't know our product! You don't know our business!" Exactly. Neither does the executive your champion is trying to win over, and if what they hear doesn't hook them in the first minute, they'll move on.
Two parts, plus links to the work behind them.
Part 1: the deal story, in three sentences. It pulls from your business case and reads a lot like a soundbite, opening on the change in the buyer's world:
[Company] is experiencing [significant change in their business / market], which means [negative outcomes].
[Executive] tasked [high-influence champion] with driving [a named project / strategic initiative] in response, with a target rollout date no later than [critical event].
Compared to [alternatives, deal threats], [Executive] confirmed [direct quote about our unique/competitive differentiator] will enable [direct quote about positive outcomes].
Part 2: seven evidence checks. Mark each one confirmed, inferred, or unknown, and note where the confirmed ones came from:
Then link the full business case, its scorecard, and the mutual action plan, so anyone who wants to go deeper can.
Pick up a few deal reviews and look at them side by side, and the differences jump out fast. Five reads cover the story:
Once you've run a few, each of those reads takes 10 or 12 seconds, which is how the whole thing lands at about a minute. (Less time than it takes to brew a cup of French press, which I drank a lot of while writing about this.)
It would, if the minute were doing the work. But the speed comes from the seven checks underneath the story, and every one of them points at something the buyer did. A written problem statement, three people confirming a metric, and a go-live date on their calendar all exist or they don't, and you can't talk your way into a confirmed.
Which means you forecast on what's confirmed. A deal in your commit column with several checks still marked unknown isn't a commit, whatever the CRM stage says, so move it back a stage. Moving a deal backward is never fun, I know, and it's also how you build a forecast leadership can trust.
And when the evidence isn't there yet, the review doesn't get shorter by skipping it. The unconfirmed checks become the agenda, and the time goes to the gap.
Coach the earliest check that isn't confirmed. The seven checks follow the order a deal moves through its stages, so a gap early in the list usually explains the gaps after it. (If you've also scored the business case, the lowest-scoring section and the earliest unconfirmed check usually point at the same gap. When they don't, start with the earlier one.)
Each unconfirmed check points at one conversation:
Then next week's review starts with whether that check moved to confirmed.
Take Morgan, from a running example in Selling With (the scoring here is illustrative). She's a marketing manager at a high-growth startup, and her CMO, John, wants customer acquisition cost below $5K before the company raises its Series B. Her team would have to ramp content tenfold to get there, and they're already stretched.
The rep's three sentences:
And that's where the rep stops, because nobody on the buyer's side has named the alternatives, let alone confirmed why this approach beats them. So the checks look like this:
So it's not a commit. The manager skips the play-by-play and coaches check #3: who else might this project impact that hasn't weighed in yet? Get two more people confirming the CAC problem, and the rest of the list has something to stand on.