Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

Predictable update: I’m working closely with a small set of beta users and just cracked the $1500 MRR mark. It’s not perfect and there’s still lots of work to do but it feels good to have a little revenue from it. If you’re interested in finding prospects you’re already connected with (and can tolerate some jankiness) hit reply.

Most founders think the weekly pipeline review is a status meeting.

Go around the room, each rep shares the latest update for each of their deals, everyone nods, a clarifying question or two is asked, meeting ends. And if that's what it is, your reps are right to hate it. A status update is a waste of everyone's time.

But that's not what a pipeline review is. And the misconception is expensive, because when you treat it like a status meeting, you eventually cancel it, and you lose the single most important instrument in your sales management toolkit.

So here's the question I want you to sit with. If your sales process is a system, a workflow you've asked humans to execute, how do you know it's actually working?

Not "are we closing deals." That's an output. Outputs lag. I mean how do you know, this week, that the process itself is being followed? To put it in nerd speak, what are your evals?

Last week I was on a coaching call with a founder I work with. Three rep sales team. One of his reps had pushed back on the weekly pipeline review, said he wasn't getting much value out of it. And from that rep's seat, fair enough. The last few reviews had focused on the other rep, who was struggling. He was showing up to defend deals he already understood to a boss who already trusted him.

The founder wanted to know: should we kill the meeting?

Here's the answer, and it comes from an unexpected place. If you've built anything with AI agents lately, you know that the workflow isn't the hard part. The hard part is the evals. The checks that tell you whether the agent actually did the thing you asked, or just produced something that looks like it.

Your sales team is no different. You've given your reps a process. Discovery before demo. Next step on the calendar before a deal is real. Do nothing is off the table before you call it qualified. The pipeline review is the eval. It's the check in the system that verifies the process is being followed, not by asking "are you following the process," but by making someone stand up in front of their boss and defend it. Yes, this is actually in discovery. Yes, they told me do nothing is off the table. And yes, I believe them.

This is a trains run on time exercise.

Could an agent run the eval? I've tried, with prompts, and it does a pretty good job. It can score MEDDPICC. It can flag stale deals. But it doesn't read between the lines exceptionally well. Whether a champion is actually a champion, whether the pain is real or just polite, whether "do nothing is off the table" was said with conviction or to get off the phone. There are places in a process where meat is required. This is one of them.

Back to my founder. Once we reframed the meeting as an eval instead of a status update, something clicked, because the eval had been producing signal for weeks. He just hadn't been reading it.

Objectively, one rep had roughly twice as many deals in his funnel as the other. Some of that was network and geography. Some of it was the founder feeding more deals to the rep he trusted. But the pipeline and the forecast sheet said it all. He'd had a feeling in his gut for a while. The eval had already put numbers on it.

That's the second thing this meeting does. Beyond checking the process, it tells you what's actually going to close this month. Eventually you'll be on a board call, or just a forecast call with yourself, saying "here's my confidence that we deliver these three to five deals." That confidence has to come from somewhere. It comes from here.

And the third thing, the one almost nobody talks about: the eval shows you where the gaps in your team are.

When I manage a sales team, I collect gaps from three places. The pipeline review, call reviews, and one on ones. Every time a rep can't answer "who's the economic buyer," that's a gap. Every deal with no next step, that's a gap. I track them per rep, and they tell me exactly which skill I need to reinforce with each person. On a larger team, that list is what directs your enablement team's focus. You're not guessing what training people need. The eval already told you.

Call reviews deserve their own mention because most founders skip them entirely. I run them individually. Bring your best call and your worst call. The best call celebrates a win and shows you what's working, which you can spread to the team. The worst call is where the coaching happens. Diagnose it together, figure out what to do differently next time. It's the same principle: another eval, another set of gaps.

If I were a full time sales leader, the cadence would look like this. Weekly pipeline review with each rep independently, a call review, and a one on one. That's 2 to 4 hours per rep, plus a team meeting, plus an hour on dashboards. Five or six hours of linear sales manager time. That's not overhead. That's the job.

So no, we didn't kill the meeting. We're adding MEDDPICC scoring to it next, actually, because the eval gets more useful as it gets more precise.

The status meeting version deserves to die. The eval version is how you find out, every single week, whether your system is working and where it's breaking.

If I sat in on your pipeline review this week, would your reps be defending their deals, or just reading them out loud?

Collin

The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers is the playbook for founders who never planned to do sales but have to figure it out anyway. It pulls together 13+ years of building software startups, building outbound systems for hundreds of B2B startups, and more failed experiments than I'd care to admit, into a practical guide for finding your first 10, 100, and 1,000 customers.

It will help you build a repeatable way to find customers without losing your weekends (or your soul).

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