Before you commit it, prove it.

The five questions, and what each one disproves

Most federal pipeline dies for one of five reasons, and the seller usually knows which one before the meeting starts. The point of naming them is to stop pretending otherwise.

CUSTOMER: Has anyone said out loud that they want this?

A requirement you inferred from a good meeting is not a requirement. What you are looking for is the customer describing the problem in their own words, ideally in writing, and deciding something has to change. If the only person who has articulated the need is you, we may be inventing it. Is there pull, or are we pushing?

MONEY: Where does the funding come from?

Federal money has a name: an appropriation, a program line, an O&M budget, a color of money with a fiscal year attached. "They have budget" with no source is the most common thing a seller believes and cannot defend. You can have a requirement, an enthusiastic customer and a contract vehicle, and still no money that can be applied to the buy. The question your manager will ask is who told you, and what is it called.

POWER: Have you met anyone who can make it happen?

Understanding the requirement and controlling the acquisition are different jobs, often different people, sometimes different buildings. Sellers mistake access for influence and enthusiasm for authority; a technical evaluator can love you and still not move a dollar. Progress means a program manager, a contracting officer, or a budget holder, somebody who can cause something to happen when it gets difficult.

PATH: How would they actually buy it?

Every federal purchase arrives through a mechanism: an existing contract, a GWAC or IDIQ, a task order, a set-aside, a recompete, a sole-source justification. If nobody has named the vehicle and the contracting office, the timeline is guesswork, because acquisition lead time is the timeline. Until somebody can describe how a purchase order eventually appears, you have demand rather than a deal.

NOW: What forces action this year?

Agencies are very good at doing nothing for another year. A forcing function is specific: a contract expiring, a product going end of life, a mandate with a date, an incident, or money that expires September 30. "Q4" is not a compelling event, and neither is "my manager wants it this quarter." What gets worse for them if they do nothing?

Why not BANT or MEDDIC?

I've used both, and plenty of versions of both. They're useful when you are working a deal. This is for the moment before that.

Over the years, most questionable deals I've seen eventually broke in one of the five places above. So those are the five questions. They won't tell you how to sell the deal. They'll tell you where the story stops matching the evidence.

BANT gets you close, but its "need" is usually something the seller diagnosed, and its "timeline" is a date in the CRM rather than a reason anything happens. It also leaves the biggest federal question unanswered: how does the government actually buy this? That's what PATH is for.

MEDDIC (or MEDDPICC, depending on who taught it to you) is more sophisticated, and that is exactly why it solves a different problem. It is for developing and managing a complex opportunity. A seller can spend forty-five minutes deciding whether somebody qualifies as an economic buyer. These five are a cross-examination, not a worksheet. They run before that debate is worth having.

MEDDIC helps you work the deal. Deal Check helps you decide whether you've earned the right to call it one.

What actually happens in a pipeline review

A pipeline review is a manager testing whether the numbers on the board can survive a question. Deals fail the same handful of ways, and a manager who has sat through a few hundred reviews knows every one of them by sight. The difference between a seller who survives the review and one who does not is rarely deal quality. It is whether they walked in already knowing which question they were going to get hit with.

If you run the review

Five questions, asked out loud, do more than a CRM field ever will. Run them on any deal and you get a shared vocabulary instead of an argument: "I'm good on customer and path, I'm yellow on money and power."

• Ask the same five every time. The consistency is what makes the answers comparable.
• Let the rep answer before you react. Sort of is an honest answer and should be safe to give.
• Weakest link first. The worst answer is the one that determines the forecast, not the average.
• Nothing gets typed into a system. Nobody has to explain later why the pipeline looked bad in writing.

The tool at the top of this page is the same five questions with the arithmetic done for you. It stores nothing and sends nothing, which means it can be used in a room where the CRM cannot. The job is the same every week: get the hopium out of the pipeline before the review.

Hi, I'm Mark.

I've spent a lot of years helping customers buy complicated technology. For six of them I led partner sales teams at AWS. Before that F5, Red Hat, and a couple of storage companies you've probably forgotten. Before all of that, 20 years as a Marine.

Along the way I've been the seller defending the deal, the partner trying to help, the manager asking annoying questions, and the guy one level up explaining why the forecast moved again.

QuotaBird is where I put the things I've found useful. Most of the tools are free. Most take a few minutes. None of them require you to adopt a new sales religion. Use whatever helps.

A few things I see a lot

Rarely just one of them. Usually a couple at the same time, quietly making each other worse.

The forecast call has become the job. Your manager wants a status on everything by noon, the CRM wants a next step on every line, and the customer is the last person you talk to each day.

The pipeline looks better than it really is. Plenty of opportunities in the CRM, but once you ask about budget, timing and who actually wants the thing, the number gets smaller fast.

The partner likes you, but nothing is happening. Plenty of meetings, maybe a joint deck. Nobody can point to the accounts where the two companies are actually trying to win something together.

The team is busy, but there isn't much rhythm. The forecast call happens. The one-on-ones happen. Nobody is sure what the team should do differently this week to make next quarter better.

The number from above doesn't match what you see below. Leadership has a growth number. Your team has a pipeline. You're the one who has to explain why they disagree without sounding like you've already given up.

A team can be behind plan for a lot of reasons. One seller needs help getting in front of customers. Another is doing fine and wants you to stay out of the way. Someone else thinks the year is already gone. Sometimes the rep is fine and the territory, the comp plan or the pipeline they inherited isn't. The useful part is figuring out which one you're dealing with before you fix the wrong one. That's what the tools here do, one deal, one rep, one territory at a time. It's also most of what I do.

Need another set of eyes?

Sometimes a calculator isn't enough. If you're stuck on a deal, an account, a partner, a territory, a QBR or a federal problem, I'm happy to look at it with you. Here's exactly how it works:

1. Pick a time. Name, email and one line about what's going on. No deck required.
2. I read your line before we talk, so we start in the middle instead of at the beginning.
3. Twenty minutes, free. Then you decide whether there's anything more. No pitch, and no sales follow-ups.

If I don't think I can help, I'll tell you.

If it's something that takes more than a conversation, we can figure that out too. I also build fedhoo, a federal market research tool.

Questions