Question

How to know when a deal is genuinely about to close.

A deal about to close has the buyer doing procedural work: legal has the paperwork, procurement has a vendor record, somebody has asked about start dates. Verbal enthusiasm at this stage means much less than administrative motion.

Late stage looks different.

Early on, the signals are about interest. Late on, they are about process. A buyer who is going to sign starts generating paperwork, and paperwork is the most reliable signal in B2B sales because it is expensive to fake.

What you should be seeing.

Legal or procurement has the document. Not promised, has it.

Somebody has asked an operational question: start date, onboarding, who from our side runs implementation. People do not plan for things they are not buying.

The signer has been in a meeting. A deal where nobody has met the person who signs has a surprise in it.

Terms are being negotiated rather than price being questioned. Those are different conversations.

What looks like closing and is not.

A verbal yes with no process started. Enthusiasm is cheap and the internal argument may not have happened yet.

A close date set by the rep rather than agreed with the buyer.

Fast replies from a champion who is the only person on the deal. Responsive and single threaded is still single threaded.

Checking it against your own history.

The only honest benchmark is your own closed deals. Take what you have won in the last year, look at what was true on each one before it closed, and compare your open deals to that.

Kaypo runs this automatically. Its back test scores your closed deals using only what was true before each one closed, so you can see what a real close actually looked like in your business rather than in somebody else average.

Questions

What are the signs a deal is about to close?

Legal or procurement has the paperwork, somebody has asked an operational question about start dates or onboarding, the signer has been in a meeting, and the conversation has moved from price to terms.

Does a verbal yes mean a deal will close?

Not on its own. A verbal yes with no internal process started usually means the champion has not had the internal argument yet.

It arrives in Slack

Every morning, each rep gets one message naming the deals on their own book that moved overnight, biggest mover first, with the reason beside each number and the deals that have gone quiet underneath.

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