Free Diagnostic · For Sales Leaders
Is This Deal a Pattern or a One-Off?
Written by Jerald Lee. Thirteen years at Google building commercial teams across Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. Now working with founder-led companies in APAC.
For founder-led companies in Hong Kong with 20 to 200 people.
Prefer a printable version? Download the blank worksheet, no email needed.Every sales leader has a deal like this somewhere on the board right now. Not dead, not moving either. Your rep says it's close. It's been close for six weeks.
This isn't really about fixing that one deal. One deal is just easier to see clearly than a whole pipeline. The real question underneath it is whether what's happening there is a one-off, or whether it's how deals like it get stuck on your team generally.
A 15-minute diagnostic for sales leaders, not sellers. Pick one deal on your team and use it to see your whole pipeline.
How to use this
- →Pick one deal to run this on. Not one of yours, one your rep is currently working.
- →Ideally one that's dragging or slower than it should be at this stage.
- →No email needed, work through it right here. Your answers save in your browser.
What's actually happening in this deal
Ask your rep, then ask the CRM. Write down both.
What does your rep say is happening right now?
What does the CRM or forecast actually say?
How long has it genuinely been sitting where it is?
What has changed, according to your rep, in the last 2–3 weeks?
The gap between the first answer and the second is usually the first real signal. If your rep's story and the CRM's story don't match, note it before you go further.
What your rep believes vs what's likely true
One column for what your rep believes about the buyer's situation. One for what you'd guess is actually true from the outside, based on what you know about deals like this.
What your rep believes
What's likely true
If you realize you don't actually know what your rep believes, without asking them, that's its own answer.
If you are not sure whether this is your tightest constraint, the scorecard takes five minutes and tells you.
Who actually decides
Who owns the final decision on the buyer's side?
Does your rep know this, or are they guessing, the same as you are right now?
Who carries the risk on the buyer's side if this goes wrong?
Who could quietly block this without ever showing up in a call?
Is your rep focused on the right people
Who is your rep spending most of their time with on this deal?
How do you actually know that?
Are those people driving the decision, or just participating in it?
Does your rep already know the one move
This is the question that matters most. If you asked your rep right now what the one move is that would actually advance this deal, would they have a clear answer, or would they defer to you?
If they know the move and haven't made it, that's an accountability gap. If they don't know it, that's a coaching gap.
Those are two different problems with two different fixes, and most leaders only find out which one they have by asking this question directly.
Define the next decision
What decision needs to happen next?
Who needs to make it, your rep, or you?
By when?
Is this typical, or a one-off?
Now step back from the deal itself. Is what you just saw typical of how deals get stuck on your team, or is this one unusual?
If it's typical, that's not a deal problem anymore. That's a pattern in how your team qualifies, coaches, and closes, the kind of thing that shows up as a soft quarter before anyone can name why.
If it's genuinely a one-off, that's a fine answer too. Worth running this same check again if the same gap shows up on a second or third deal.
Either way, you've got a sharper read on one deal than you had twenty minutes ago.
Most leaders find out about a stall the same way: a forecast slips, and only then do they go looking for why.
This check moves that discovery earlier, before the damage, not after.
If this looked like a pattern
One stuck deal is a coaching moment.
A pattern of them is a system problem.
The next step is a Growth Review, a focused 90-minute session (USD 500) where we look at whether what you just saw is isolated or systemic, and what's actually driving it.
For leaders who want the deeper work, that continues through a Revenue Audit, a structured look at how revenue actually moves through your business, followed by hands-on work to fix what's broken.
Book a Growth ReviewSales coaching & revenue systems · Hong Kong & APAC
One deal shows you the pattern. A playbook is how you fix it.
Built by Jerald Lee, nearly 13 years leading sales teams at Google across APAC.
A sales playbook isn't a document about your product. It's the set of decisions your team makes the same way every time: how deals get qualified, when they get walked away from, what a real next step looks like, how reviews happen. If the diagnostic above showed you a pattern, your team is missing a page of that playbook.
That's the work we do with sales leaders across Hong Kong and APAC, part sales coaching, part systems: building the playbook out of your team's real deals, then making the review habits stick so the pattern doesn't come back.
A few things worth knowing.
What is a sales playbook, practically?
The repeatable decisions behind your pipeline, qualification standards, deal review cadence, walk-away rules. Written down, used weekly, owned by the team, not the founder.
Is this sales training?
No. Training teaches technique in a classroom. This builds your playbook from deals currently on your board, with your leaders in the room.
How do we start?
A free 30 minute fit call, or a Growth Review if you want to go straight at the constraint.
Related: How the Revenue System works
Email me what I wrote
We will send you what you just filled in above, plus a blank printable copy to run this again on another deal.
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