How to run your weekly sales stand-up
The leading indicators to track, the right altitude for the funnel stage, and more
Hi friends - This week we’re talking about weekly sales standups! And how to run an effective one. Questions? Shoot them over.
p.s. - Did you know I run another newsletter for fractional execs? If you know anyone who might benefit, send them to this link. I just published a highly requested article about how I navigated maternity leave last year.
The reality is - most sales stand-ups aren’t that effective.
And to be clear — weekly sales stand-ups are one of the most important meetings on your calendar. They should absolutely be happening. They’re how you keep your finger on the pulse of your pipeline, keep your team aligned, and catch problems before they become quarter-ending surprises. The issue isn’t whether to have them — it’s how you run them effectively and efficiently.
After working with nearly 30 startups, I can tell you that the most common format I see…going around the room and reviewing every single deal in the pipeline. And that just isn’t an effective use of your team’s time. Not every deal in your pipeline deserves weekly discussion.
Here’s the problem: deal-by-deal reviews don’t help you answer the questions that actually matter like:
Do we have enough new pipeline created to statistically hit our number?
Do we have enough pipeline coverage for the month/quarter to hit our number?
Where are deals stuck and how can we fix it?
And most importantly — if we’re off track, what are we going to do about it right now?
A good sales stand-up should take 30-45 minutes and accomplish three things: keep the team aligned on what’s happening across the business, give you a real-time read on pipeline health, and surface the deals that actually need group discussion. Everything else can be handled in your 1:1s.
This is the standing agenda I use across all of my client engagements. Feel free to steal it.
Key updates and team training (5-10 minutes)
This is your housekeeping block. Use it for anything the team needs to know before diving into pipeline — product updates, new feature releases, changes to pricing or packaging, competitive intel, or updates on strategic initiatives.
This is also a great time slot for brief team training. Maybe you want to do a quick roleplay on a common objection you’ve been hearing, share a new piece of sales enablement content, or walk through a recent win (or loss) and what the team can learn from it. Not every week needs training, but having a dedicated slot for it means it actually happens instead of getting perpetually deprioritized.
Keep this tight. If a topic needs more than 10 minutes, it gets its own meeting.
Pipeline review (20-25 minutes)
This is the heart of your stand-up, and it’s structured intentionally to move through the funnel from top to bottom. You’re not reviewing every deal — you’re reviewing the metrics and patterns that tell you whether you’re on track. And this section is supported by a dedicated pipeline dashboard.
Top of funnel
Net new opportunities
Start here because this is your leading indicator for revenue/quota attainment.
How many new deals were created this week? This month? And more importantly — are we on pace to hit our quota and revenue targets?
If you don’t know how many new deals you need to create, here’s the formula:
Net new deals needed = (revenue target ÷ average contract value) ÷ conversion rate
If you don’t have a reliable conversion rate yet (and honestly, most early-stage startups don’t), use 10% as a baseline. You can refine this over time as your deal stage tracking matures and gives you real data.
If you’re behind pace, this is where you talk about what to do now — not at the end of the quarter when it’s too late. Can we increase outbound activity? Is there a campaign we can accelerate? Are there partnerships we can tap?
The whole point of reviewing this weekly is to course-correct early.
Lead source analysis
Where are your new deals coming from? And does that source mix align with what you’d expect given your recent GTM investments?
For example, if you just sent three people to a conference last month, you should be seeing deals in the pipeline from that event. If you launched a new outbound campaign, are those leads converting? If referrals have dried up, why?
This isn’t about obsessing over attribution models. It’s about pattern recognition. You want to make sure your pipeline sources are diversified and that you’re getting a return on the time and money you’re spending to capture demand.
Middle of funnel
Pipeline coverage
Do you have 3-4x pipeline coverage for the current quarter? What about the upcoming quarter?
Pipeline coverage is the ratio of your total open pipeline value to your revenue target for a given period. For example, if you need to close $500K this quarter and you have $2M in pipeline, you have 4x coverage — meaning for every $1 you need to close, you have $4 in potential deals working.
This is the single most important metric for your forecasting confidence. If you need to close $500K this quarter and you only have $1M in pipeline, you’re undercovered and it’s time to take action. Either you need to create more pipeline, increase deal sizes, or accelerate timelines — and you need a plan for which lever you’re pulling.
I see a lot of startups skip this question entirely because they haven’t set up their deal stages properly and don’t trust their pipeline data. That’s a fixable problem, and it’s worth fixing fast — because flying blind on coverage is how you end up scrambling at the end of every quarter or year.
Bottom of funnel
Late-stage opportunities
Now you get into specific deals — but only the ones that are close to the finish line.
What’s in your final or late deal stages? What needs to happen to get these across the line? Are there blockers, risks, or stakeholders you haven’t engaged yet?
This is where team discussion actually adds value. Maybe your AE needs help navigating a procurement process, or your founder needs to make an executive-to-executive call to unstick a deal. Surface those needs here so the team can rally around them.
Large opportunities
Regardless of stage, any deal above a certain threshold (I typically use >$100-500K ACV, but adjust to what’s material for your business) gets a standing spot on the agenda.
These are your strategic deals — the ones that can make or break a quarter — and they deserve regular visibility even if they’re still early stage.
Conversion rates
This one comes with a caveat: you can only review stage-to-stage conversion rates once your deal tracking is consistent and you have enough data to make it meaningful. For many of the startups I work with, this is a “future state” item that gets added to the agenda once the foundation is solid.
But once you’re ready, this is incredibly powerful. Where are you losing the most deals? At what stage? Why? Is it a targeting problem (wrong ICP), a process problem (too slow, missing steps), or a people problem (skill gaps on the team)?
This is where sales becomes a science experiment — and you can only run that experiment if you’re changing one variable at a time and measuring the results.
A few rules to make this work
Prep before the meeting. You and your reps should update their pipeline before the stand-up, not during it. No one wants to sit through five minutes of someone fumbling through their CRM live. Set the expectation that pipeline data is current by the morning of your stand-up.
To make this easier, I always create a pipeline hygiene dashboard that flags deals with missing or stale data — things like a deal with no amount, no contact associated, or no activity logged in the last 10 days. That dashboard goes out to the team before the weekly meeting so reps know exactly what needs to be cleaned up. It takes the guesswork out of prep and means you’re walking into the stand-up with data you can actually trust.
Stay at the right altitude. Your top-of-funnel and mid-funnel review should stay at the metrics level — you’re looking at patterns and pace, not individual deals. But when you get to late-stage opportunities and large deals, that is the time to dig in. The whole point of those agenda items is to get specific about what needs to happen to close. The key is knowing when you’re in “metrics mode” versus “deal strategy mode” and not letting one bleed into the other.
Make it a habit. Same time, same day, same agenda, every week. Consistency compounds. You’ll start to develop an intuition for your pipeline rhythms, and your team will learn to self-diagnose issues before you even have to ask.
Track your leading indicators, not just lagging ones. Revenue closed is a lagging indicator — it tells you what already happened. Net new deals created, pipeline coverage, and deal velocity are leading indicators. They tell you what’s going to happen. Your stand-up should be focused on the leading indicators so you can actually influence the outcome.
Your weekly stand-up shouldn’t feel like a status report. It should feel like a working session where the team walks out knowing exactly where they stand, what’s at risk, and what they need to do this week to stay or get back on track.
With love and gratitude -
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