What are opportunity reviews? Why are they important?

Opportunity reviews are highly detailed sales training processes that help sellers improve their effectiveness while providing managers greater visibility into performance – while the terms “opportunity reviews” and “forecasting” are often used interchangeably, forecasting involves evaluating all opportunities at a high level and determining the accuracy of the forecast. An opportunity review is a deep dive into a single opportunity. 

They provide a built-in opportunity for management to guide teams and better understand the health of the department – managers use opportunity reviews to understand the gaps within their team’s engagement. This allows managers to provide coaching without disrupting the sales process, evaluate the probability of specific elements of the forecast, and take a proactive approach to strengthening their teams.  

Only 10% of $10 – 100MM ARR companies conduct robust opportunity reviews – frontline managers are the most overwhelmed members of any organization, and the majority of frontline managers don’t have the time to conduct opportunity reviews or even think strategically about the majority of the work they’re doing. By conducting opportunity reviews for just 1 engagement per seller, you can make the workload manageable for your managers and give your team a significant upskilling advantage over your competition. 

What are the objectives of an opportunity review? 

The 6 objectives of opportunity reviews
1. Encourage strategic thinking	Reviews motivate sellers to think strategically about their opportunities and advance their positions within deals.
2. Offer targeted feedback and coaching	Managers can provide feedback on strategic execution, focusing on high-impact advice rather than creating long to-do lists.
3. Apply training concepts in real-time	Reviews illustrate the deliberate application of training concepts, offering both tactical and hands-on advice.
4. Establish consistent coaching rhythms	Regular reviews create a consistent cadence for inspecting opportunities across the sales team.
5. Gather insights on performance	Managers can observe and gather insights on bright spots, challenges, and opportunities for improvement.
6. Identify recurring themes for team development	Reviews help identify common needs and strengths across the sales team, shaping reinforcement efforts and skill development priorities for individuals and for the team holistically.

How often should opportunity reviews be conducted?

In general, you should conduct opportunity reviews at least once a month – opportunity reviews should have a consistent rhythm that allows for effective coaching and deal progression without overwhelming the team this cadence varies on a case-by-case basis, 

Follow the same opportunity until it’s closed (won or lost) – this allows you to walk the seller through an entire sales cycle and impart learnings that the seller can leverage throughout all of the opportunities in their pipeline. 

3 factors can help determine how frequently an opportunity should be reviewed:

1. The length of your sales cycle – shorter cycles require more frequent meetings.

2. Complexity of the opportunity – the more complicated the deal, the greater the likelihood that opportunity reviews will help prevent issues from cropping up or being missed.

3. Competence of your sellers and managers – less experienced team members receive valuable coaching during opportunity reviews, so expect to conduct them more frequently for sellers who are onboarding or struggling.

Who should participate in an opportunity review?

Participant	Role
Seller	• Present the current status of the opportunity • Raise potential issues • Request feedback/support
Sales support or application engineer (if applicable)	• Provide a technical point of view to the conversion • Provides value when discussing the business landscape • Serve as accountability “checks and balances” • Engineers might also note specific details the seller misses, or be approached with different kinds of information that the buyer didn’t think to mention to the seller.
Frontline manager	Lead the review, ensure that seller is receiving necessary support, and evaluate the probability of closing the opportunity.

Involve the manager’s leader (as needed) for a more strategic perspective – leaders should regularly “inspect what they expect”. For example, VPs of Revenue can benefit from better understanding the types of deals that their sellers struggle to close so they can ensure that future forecasts provide a more accurate assessment of pipeline risk. High-level leadership doesn’t need to be present for all opportunity reviews, but they need familiarity with important opportunities and the overall health of the department. Their participation also provides a broader opportunity to assess coaching needs for all levels of the Sales team and enables leaders to draw on their own experience and insights to fill in any gaps.   

Meeting Process 

What is discussed in an opportunity review? What should be in the opportunity review document? 

Landscape	Relevant information
Political	• People involved in the decision-making process (influencers and decision-makers) • Decision criteria • Detractors and potential roadblocks
Business	• Business goals and initiatives • Current state challenges and negative consequences • Quantified pain points • Decision criteria and process • Budget and timing considerations
Competitive	• Your direct competitors • Internal competitors (departments competing for money or priorities) • Strengths, weaknesses, and differentiators of those direct and internal competitors

Opportunity review documents include information about the company and quantifiable metrics that demonstrate pipeline value – while they focus on the political, business, and competitive landscapes of the opportunity, review documents should also include basic opportunity information such as forecast category, opportunity value, and known challenges. In order to keep the team laser-focused, the review document is the only document that should be used during the review itself. 

How should a sales manager prepare ahead of an opportunity review? 

Prepare questions that reveal the status of the opportunity – using the opportunity review document, sales leaders should identify questions that will provide clarity and context around the opportunity itself. They should create questions for each landscape mentioned in the opportunity review and be prepared to build on those questions based on the additional information the seller will present during the meeting. 

Understand the value of the opportunity and any relevant news that will impact the seller’s efforts – in addition to reviewing the exact status and potential value of the opportunity, managers should review any newsworthy items that could impact the people the seller is engaged with and have a point of view on how to handle those updates. 

Proactively set the tone of the meeting and come prepared to meet the seller where they are – managers should “do their homework” and understand the seller’s experience level before the opportunity review. This allows the manager to use empathy and personal experience to tailor their approach based on the seller’s needs and experience. Regardless of how well an opportunity is progressing, managers should be mentally prepared to help their sellers, not create feelings of shame or unnecessary stress when more junior employees need support. 

How should sales reps prepare for an opportunity review? 

Sellers can best prepare by having the right attitude – the opportunity review is a chance for sellers to present the situation and get the training and/or support they need to improve it. Sellers can get the most out of their opportunity reviews by applying this mindset in 3 ways. 

1. Be transparent and factual	Sellers should come to the meeting with a well-thought-out opinion on the status of the opportunity. The seller must provide true information based on real conversations or prospect data.  Note: sellers should avoid guessing if they don’t have certain information because one goal of this exercise is to uncover the gaps in the opportunity.
2. Embrace a learning mindset	Opportunity reviews help sellers learn. If the seller is not prepared to have an open mind as they receive feedback or hear more senior team members discuss potential solutions, they won’t be able to benefit from the meeting.
3. Approach the meeting with curiosity and humility	Opportunity reviews should feel like an exciting chance to figure out what’s preventing the seller from advancing the opportunity. They are hands-on problem-solving sessions, and approaching these meetings with a desire to understand will alleviate the natural tension sellers feel when they have forecast or opportunity reviews.

How do you choose which opportunity to conduct a review for? 

Follow the 80/20 rule to select opportunities that enable your seller’s development to have the highest impact – you can’t do opportunity reviews for every engagement, but the majority (80%) of opportunities are similar to one another. The most helpful opportunity reviews give sellers the chance to prove their aptitude by taking what they learn from one engagement and applying it to other opportunities in the pipeline. As sellers become more experienced, you can include engagements from “the 20%”, but developing sellers will get the most benefit from learning skills that are applicable to as many cases as possible. 

Choose engagements right after the discovery phase – if you choose an opportunity that’s already progressed too far through the sales process, your seller has lost a valuable learning opportunity. Continue to conduct reviews for the same opportunity through the close phase, and then select a new opportunity that is completing the discovery phase. 

High impact, high effort opportunities provide the most valuable learning opportunities – not only could opportunity reviews increase a seller’s likelihood of closing an account that’s valuable to the business, but they ensure that the seller is learning how to think strategically about accounts. Similarly, the process is wasted on “easy” accounts that lack political challenges because there aren’t as many organic problems that provide opportunities for the seller and manager to problem solve together. 

What should the agenda in an opportunity review meeting look like? 

Agenda item	Time allocation	Description
Purpose and process	5 minutes	Manager states the purpose, process, and payoff of the meeting. This should include a reminder for the seller to focus on facts and to be honest if they don’t know something.
Seller overview	10 minutes	Seller gives an overview of the opportunity, providing more in-depth information than what’s in the opportunity review document (which everyone should have already read). Everyone else should listen closely and not interrupt.
Manager questions	20 minutes	Manager asks questions for clarity, understanding, and context across all 3 landscapes. The tone of the questions should make it clear that the manager is not being combative; they are seeking to understand the situation.
Coaching and solution discussion	15 minutes	Now that the manager has all the information they need, they dig into coaching and collaborating with the seller on possible solutions (strategy & tactics).
Recap	5 minutes	Seller recaps key takeaways and ensures that all attendees are aligned on the top 3 action items. Manager asks how seller will execute these action items to make sure they have a clear path forward.

What are the 5 essential questions sales leaders need to answer to help sellers convey value to customers? 

The 5 essential questions help sellers understand how to sell value instead of disconnected features and benefits – all 5 questions naturally flow into one another because they are designed to help sellers conceptualize how your product offering creates something that your buyer needs. By training sellers to think about value—and how to use this knowledge across different stages of the sales process—sellers become more effective and more confident. 

5 Questions To Answer For Value-Based Sales

1. What’s your value proposition?

2. What problems are you solving for your customer?

3. How exactly do you solve those problems?

4. How do you solve those problems differently or better than others?

5. What is your proof? What metrics can you use?

You can protect EBITDA by teaching team members how to sell value – if a sales team relies on discounting to close deals, their sellers need training and coaching to teach them how to sell buyers on the true value of your product. Discounting typically decreases by 70%+ when sellers are trained on the 5 essential questions. 

What metrics should be examined during an opportunity review?

Owner	Metrics		How to use them
Seller	• Conversion rate and duration for each stage • Percentage of buyers they’ve met with (and how many they’ve had meaningful conversations with) • Metrics from customers		Basic pipeline metrics help sellers keep themselves on track for each opportunity. By measuring how closely their product can help a buyer’s company solve their most important problem or achieve their most important goal (indicators of how important your product is to the company), sellers can anticipate deal size and likelihood of close.
Manager	• Average conversion rate and duration for each stage across their full seller team		Managers should compare the individual metrics of each seller against the benchmarked averages of their team. When coaching sellers, look at all metrics together, not in isolation. For example, it isn’t necessarily a problem if a seller’s duration is too high in the demo and discovery stage; this initial time investment could allow them to have shorter scope, proposal, negotiation, and close times later on.

How should your approach change when you work with onboarding or struggling sellers? 

Onboarding reps should start with fly-on-the-wall participation – before they ever have an opportunity review of their own, new reps should watch their more tenured team members participate in multiple opportunity reviews. This lowers the new rep’s anxiety about the review format and gives them a safe opportunity to learn by showing how more experienced team members get value from the meetings. 

Pace yourself when training less experienced reps – the level of detail and sophistication of coaching that you employ during opportunities reviews must be appropriate for the skill and will level of the rep. If you have a new rep who doesn’t have technical experience or is learning how to sell a complex solution, you need to give them time to gradually increase their familiarity with the product instead of overwhelming them with complicated sales strategies. For example, if you would double click into a topic with an experienced seller, you should only single click into that topic with someone who is new to the company. 

Meet with struggling reps more frequently to provide additional support and evaluate their aptitude – reps can struggle for a variety of reasons. Many of those reasons are skill- or experience-based, so meeting biweekly instead of monthly can help you provide the level of coaching, training, and tools they need to get back on track. In addition, this cadence gives you more opportunities to measure their progress and aptitude on the new skills they’re building. If you notice that their struggle is a pattern (and that they aren’t improving despite your added investment), the rep probably isn’t a good fit for the role.  

Be careful when taking a copiloting approach with struggling or inexperienced sellers – it’s appropriate for managers to become involved in the sales process itself if the seller isn’t able to do it on their own. However, if managers “take over” the relationship in too blatant a fashion, this signals both to the rep and to the prospect that the original person on the account wasn’t very good—and this signal won’t improve your chances of converting the buyer. If you do get involved, think of yourself as a coauthor or copilot who is supporting the seller, not doing the majority of the work. 

What tools can be used to facilitate opportunity reviews?

Documents and systems
Before the review	Managers should look at their CRM and review the opportunity review document before the meeting. They should be familiar with the stage of the opportunity, the dollar value, and relevant products as well as the seller’s individual benchmarks, conversion rates, and duration rates throughout the process.
During the review	Focus only on the opportunity review document and what the seller is saying. Bringing in additional tools distracts from the purpose of the meeting.

Meeting recordings
Purpose 1: help the manager	Recording the meeting helps managers identify coachable moments that they can use when building development plans for the seller. Recordings also help managers capture any information they might’ve missed while taking notes.
Purpose 2: help the seller	Managers can use opportunity review meeting recordings the way coaches use game footage. Sellers see their own improvements in action and gain confidence in their new skill sets when they see the difference between how they used to handle a situation and how they handle it after coaching.
Purpose 3: help the leader	The person who leads the team or manages the manager can critique the manager’s coaching ability by watching how they act in these meetings over time. Recordings enable leaders to keep a pulse on managers’ coaching aptitude without having to attend each meeting in person.

Post-meeting 

How do you incorporate the insights form opportunity reviews into sales forecasts? 

Adjust relevant probabilities in your win-loss forecasts if agent aptitude and buyer decision criteria overlap – if you know a particular seller struggles with something that will determine if you win or lose certain accounts, it’s likely that the seller has overestimated their ability to close the account—and that the forecast should be adjusted. For example, if your seller struggles to identify champions and an opportunity depends on your ability to appeal to a champion, the likelihood of that seller closing that opportunity is low, even if the seller feels confident. 

Examples of how opportunity reviews can enhance sales forecasting accuracy

A deeper understanding of deal dynamics lets you identify the true status of specific opportunities

Identifying seller skill gaps (e.g., poor champion qualification) lets you extrapolate the impact of consistent issues on forecast accuracy

Evaluating the depth of your team’s engagement within a customer organization allows you to better predict deal likelihood

Helping sellers better quantify customer interest/ challenges ensures that your urgency and deal probability metrics are more accurate

Identifying misalignments between the sales process and customer buying journey enable your team to make process and measurement changes that will improve forecast accuracy

How can sales managers and leaders apply lessons and insights from opportunity reviews to improve sales across the function?

Seller struggles can reveal customer insights that should inform your product or packaging strategies – opportunity reviews give leadership a detailed understanding of how customers are reacting to what you’re selling. When patterns emerge from opportunity reviews—such as buyers consistently pushing back on certain features or pricing—sales managers can work with product teams to adjust offerings, simplify packages, or recalibrate pricing strategies to better match market expectations.

Opportunity reviews reveal the natural tensions between the buying and selling processes for your product – sales processes are imperfect and should evolve over time to reach a middle ground between what works for your business and what your buyers need to have happen to convert. If sellers are consistently struggling with the same stage or activity in the sales process, this could indicate that the problem isn’t in their skill set, but in the process itself.  

Patterns in seller weak spots can help you improve your onboarding process – if every seller on your team has the same problem, you need to reevaluate your training and onboarding programs. Either the processes and content themselves must be improved, or the person doing the training isn’t effective.

How can managers provide more effective coaching during opportunity reviews?

Focus on developing one important skill at a time – it can be easy for managers to identify long lists of problems and overwhelm their sellers with a laundry list of things to fix. Good managers are able to take a step back and understand which skill is the most important for the seller to learn first and focus on that before moving onto the next item on the list. This approach develops sellers without undermining their self-confidence and lets them devote the necessary time to the most important skills. 

Come to each meeting prepared with ideas inspired by individual sellers and the team as a whole – addressing common themes across your department is just as important as helping sellers with their unique problems. Since many of the challenges sellers face are relatable for their team members, managers should always have at least one idea for how to help each seller on their team improve before they even enter the meeting. 

Overall

What are the most important things to get right?

Make opportunity reviews a positive experience that sellers look forward to – if both managers and sellers set the right tone for the meeting, sellers will have an incredibly valuable (and possibly enjoyable) opportunity to get help developing their skills and to become better at their job. Sellers who participate in successful programs frequently ask if they can do opportunity reviews for future engagements because it’s such a positive experience. 

Coaching is only effective if sellers are honest – encourage a culture of honesty amongst both sellers and managers. It’s more important to have accurate data than to have an answer for everything. If new sellers are transparent with important information and tenured sellers maintain their curiosity, the opportunity review process can help both parties develop new skills. 

Leverage insights from individual meetings to develop team-wide initiatives – the 80/20 rule applies to your entire pipeline and workforce, not just individual sellers. If one seller struggles in a particular area, it’s likely that other team members can benefit from the same coaching. Get the most out of your review program by viewing the findings from individual meetings as opportunities to level up your entire team. 

Measure the results of your program and adjust accordingly – to evaluate the effectiveness of opportunity reviews, sellers must track metrics consistently and with the right level of detail. In addition to their standard pipeline metrics, they should track metrics that are directly related to the skills they’re learning (e.g., what percentage of a committee are they talking to?). If you can observe meaningful change in both the metrics and the results of each seller, your program is working. If you aren’t seeing a shift in either or both of those factors, you need to reevaluate the program.  

What are common pitfalls? 

A lack of top-down accountability undermines the utility of the entire process – if your organization doesn’t commit to executing reviews consistently, attendees won’t take the meetings seriously and sellers won’t derive the same benefit from going through a partial opportunity review process. Similarly, if a manager lacks the discipline and/or ability to execute the entire process, neither the seller, manager, nor the department will reap the full benefits. 

When managers take an interrogation-style approach to reviews, the learning focus of the meeting is compromised – managers should seek to understand, not to prove their own intelligence. If you don’t ask questions from a place of genuine curiosity and desire to help, sellers will pick up on it and become defensive. Giving yourself the opportunity to collect the information you need will also enable you to provide better advice. 

Managers who don’t ask sellers how they will address gaps create opportunities for failure – poor managers either tell sellers exactly how to do something without asking for the seller’s input (which is important, because sellers know their accounts better than their managers do), or assign action items without making sure the seller knows how to execute those items. If the seller isn’t clear on how to execute a task that they might be doing for the first time, they won’t be able to efficiently develop the new skill.