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Throughout my career, one topic that has been under constant discussion is the question, what’s a deal? What constitutes an opportunity versus a meeting? While this answer can be based on your industry, the particular way your company operates, and numerous other factors, there are a handful of basic tenets that we should all consider.
Table of Contents
1. Cold Call
This is when we reach out to a contact with whom we have no prior existing relationship. Sometimes these contacts are found through social media, the database of a third party software, or contacts within our own CRM with whom we never interacted.
These are not deals.
2. Warm Lead
This is when there is some relationship between the company and the lead. These contacts often come from Marketing whereby they downloaded a whitepaper, read a case study, requested a demo, or interacted with your brand via social media, your website, or in-person, in some significant way.
The initial meeting between sales and a warm lead is not a deal.
3. Relationship Call
Often in sales, reps have prior existing relationships with potential buyers. When a rep reaches out to someone they know, a deal can materialize quickly as it may require less “selling” to get them to look at our offering. However, this existing relationship does not constitute a deal on its own. A rep must go through that initial phone call and qualification process in order to qualify this as a deal.
The initial relationship call is not a deal.
4. Any Initial Meeting
The best way to summarize the 3 headlines above = Initial Meetings. In B2B sales, an initial meeting is almost never a deal. The exception would be if someone reached out to us, told us that they wanted to buy our product ASAP, and just wanted a price or a quick demo. However, that is the exception in the B2B world, not the rule.
Please note that an initial meeting is the first step in the buying process, but it’s not a deal; usually.
5. What’s a Deal? Post 1st Meeting
We only have a deal after our prospect has expressed interest after our initial meeting and we have preliminarily qualified them as a viable opportunity. It’s important to remember that it’s not just the buyer who needs to express interest in our solution, but our sales team that must decide if we have the right offering based on the buyer’s needs.
Check out our post on Deal Stages for a more in-depth explanation.
6. Demo
If we have a demo lined up, it may or may not be a deal; let’s elaborate.
A demo is not a deal when it’s the initial meeting. If a contact requests a demo on your website, this is a warm lead, not a deal. While you may give someone a product demonstration on the initial call, your demo is only a deal if it is our second meeting, or beyond, whereby our prospect showed interest and we already qualified them as an opportunity.
Wrap Up
Talk with your team and establish a baseline of what’s a deal and what’s not. This is important because we don’t want to look at our pipeline and see false deals. Our pipeline looks wildly inflated if, for example, we see 20 deals in the first stage versus the 5 that should actually be there. We want clean and accurate data in our CRM, and knowing what is and is not a deal is an important step.