Sales & PartnershipsFree
Quarter-End Deal Triage and Priority List
Which open deals can still close in the working days that are left, which cannot, and which ones to stop today.
River's quarter-end triage reads the open pipeline the way the calendar reads it. Give it the deals with a close date inside the quarter, the number, and how many people are actually working. It returns three lists: the deals to commit, the deals to leave alone, and the ones to stop working outright. Each carries the one thing still missing, and a sheet ranks all of them on evidence from the record rather than on anyone's confidence call.
The ranking runs on two joins nobody makes. First, each deal's own remaining cycle time, taken from the stage it actually entered and the median your won deals took from that same stage, set against the working days left. Second, the close-date edit history sitting in the CRM. A deal on its fourth close date is a habit rather than a forecast, and counting those edits separates the two in a single pass.
Built for the manager three weeks out who has to submit a number, the deal desk lead who can see the discount requests coming, and the rep with eleven open deals and time for four. Run it on the Monday of week ten rather than the Friday of week twelve, while a deal you drop can still be set up properly for next quarter. The deals that survive the cut get a close plan, and the ones already stalled go to the blocker brief.
What the last three weeks of a quarter actually look like
The last day of the quarter is not a deadline, it is where the deals live. In one enterprise software vendor's database of 7,912 deals, 67 percent closed on the literal last day of the quarter and 21 percent across the middle eleven weeks combined. Public filers say the same thing to investors in plainer language. BlackLine tells shareholders it signs a high percentage of agreements during the last month of the quarter, and notes that the seasonality shows up in its billings and bookings.
That concentration has a price, and it lands on the deals you force. In the same dataset the average discount was 34.8 percent, and 64 percent of deals were priced to land exactly on an approval band of 20, 30, 40 or 60. Discounts rose above 35 percent at both ends of the quarter and sat below 30 through the middle. The paper puts the resulting mispricing at six to eight percent of revenue.
Then do the arithmetic. Fenwick Analytics on Monday 9 March, 17 working days to quarter end: 31 open deals worth $4.8 million. Their own won deals take a median of 21 working days from Proposal to signature, so 19 deals worth $2,945,000 cannot close, whatever anyone commits. Twelve fit the calendar. Four reps at three real hours a day give 204 hours, a late-stage deal takes 21, so nine fit. The three cut include the two largest deals in the quarter.
How it works
Paste the pipeline
Every deal with a close date this quarter, its stage, its amount and its history.
River checks the calendar
Each deal's remaining cycle time from the stage it is in, against the working days left.
Rank and cut
Push history breaks the ties, and your team's real hours decide where the line falls.
Work three lists
Commit, leave alone, stop working, each with the next action and the honest number attached.
What you get
- Every open deal ranked on stage history and close-date changes rather than a confidence field
- The deals that cannot close in the working days left, named and separated out
- A commit list sized to the hours your team actually has, not to the pipeline
- The one specific thing still missing on every deal you are choosing to work
- An explicit stop-working list, with what to do with each of those deals instead
- The honest number for the quarter, and the gap against what was submitted
Common questions
Our reps say most of these can still close.
They may be right, and the record settles it. Take the median working days your own won deals spent between the stage each open deal sits in now and signature. Anything longer than the days left is not a judgment call. In the worked example that removed 19 of 31 deals before anyone argued about a single one.
Why cut deals that genuinely can close?
Because attention is the scarce thing in the last three weeks, not pipeline. Four reps at three real hours a day have 204 hours, and a late-stage deal takes about 21 of them. Spread across all twelve that fit the calendar, every deal gets 17 hours for work that needs 21, and you lose deals you already had.
What about discounting to pull them in?
It works, and it is the most expensive thing on the list. Moving the three cut deals one approval band, from 20 percent off list to 30, turns $612,000 into $535,500. That is $76,500 given away to close a $107,000 gap, before the desk review asks who signs off on the band.
How do you count close-date pushes without clean data?
Close date is among the fields most teams already track, so the edit history is often sitting there unused. Where it is not, the notes and the calendar carry the same signal: a deal discussed as closing in two different quarters has been pushed once, whatever the record says. In the worked example, 41 of 63 edits sat on deals that could not close.
What happens to the deals we stop working?
They get a date and an owner for next quarter, not silence. The brief writes what each one is actually waiting on and when to pick it up, so a deal you set down in March is warm in April rather than restarted. A mutual action plan is the right container once it is moving again.
Will this just make our forecast look worse?
It will make it match. The worked example submitted $1,550,000 for the remaining weeks and the honest number was $1,243,000, a total of $2,293,000 against a $2,400,000 quota. Knowing you are $107,000 short on day 68 is worth something. Knowing on day 90 is worth nothing at all.
Is this the same as a pipeline review?
A deal review inspects deals one at a time and improves each of them. This ranks the whole set against a fixed calendar and a fixed number of hours, then names what to drop. The first makes deals better. The second decides which ones get the time, which is the harder call and the one usually left unmade.
Quarter-End Deal Triage and Priority List
Fill in the form and your workspace opens with the work already underway.