A deal review template is the standardized doc your AEs fill out for every strategic opportunity, and the single source of truth your sales leader uses in commit calls. Done right, it compresses a one-hour deal walk into a ten-minute decision. Done wrong, it becomes a vanity form reps copy-paste the day before QBR. This guide shows you how to build the version reps use because it makes their deals easier to close.
Time: 60 minutes
The first mistake every sales org makes is bolting MEDDPICC, BANT, SPICED, and the CEO's favorite Challenger slide into one Frankenstein template. Pick one spine. For most strategic B2B motions with a buying committee and procurement, MEDDPICC is the right call because it covers metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, paper process, identify pain, champion, and competition in a single thread. BANT is lighter and better suited to transactional segments. COM (Close Plan, Opportunity, Mutual Action Plan) layers nicely on top of either as the execution surface. Choose, document the choice, and kill the overlapping fields. A template that asks for both 'economic buyer' and 'budget authority' is a template that confuses reps and produces inconsistent data across the team.
Each MEDDPICC field needs two things on the template: a value and the evidence. 'Economic buyer: Sarah Chen, VP Finance' is a value. The evidence is the artifact that proves it, for example 'confirmed on the May 12 call, invited to the June business review, replied to the pricing email directly'. Without the evidence column, reps write aspirational answers. With it, they either produce the artifact or admit the gap. Build out eight fields: Metrics (quantified business impact in the buyer's language), Economic Buyer (named and confirmed), Decision Criteria (how they will choose), Decision Process (steps and timing to signature), Paper Process (procurement, legal, security, DPA), Identify Pain (the trigger, not the symptom), Champion (tested, see step four), and Competition (named vendors plus the status quo).
Metrics is where ninety percent of deal reviews fall apart. Reps write 'they want to be more efficient' and move on. The template should force three sub-values: the baseline (the number today), the target (the number after Strkr), and the dollar impact (the delta multiplied by a dollar figure the buyer agreed to). If a rep cannot complete all three, the Metrics field is incomplete and the deal does not qualify as a commit candidate. The baseline comes from the discovery call. The target comes from the champion. The dollar impact comes from a conversation with Finance or Operations, not from a rep's spreadsheet. The template should include a short prompt beside the field, for example, 'what number did the buyer say out loud, in what unit, and on what date'. That prompt alone drives a measurable lift in forecast accuracy within one quarter.
A Champion field that is just a name is useless. A real Champion has three properties: they have power inside the account, they have given you something that cost them political capital (a referral upward, a meeting on their calendar with their boss, a confidential document), and they can articulate your value in their own words to a stranger. The template should force the rep to answer three questions: who is the champion, what have they done that proves they are the champion, and what is the next thing you have asked them to do. If the rep cannot answer the second question with a specific action, the account has a Coach or a Supporter, not a Champion. Coaches lose deals. Champions win them. The Sales Leader uses this field to kill deals early that look healthy on paper but have no internal advocate.
Reps conflate these two and it costs deals every quarter. The Decision Process is how the buyer decides to say yes: who is in the room, in what order, with what artifacts, by when. The Paper Process is what happens after the yes: procurement, legal review, security review, data processing agreement, insurance certificates, vendor onboarding, PO issuance, and signature routing. A buyer can say yes in week ten and still take six weeks to sign because nobody mapped the paper process. The template should ask for both as dated step lists, for example, 'legal review scheduled June 14, security questionnaire returned June 20, procurement intake June 24'. If the rep cannot name the procurement contact and the typical cycle time, the close date is a guess, not a forecast.
The Competition field should list every named competitor and the status quo as a competitor in its own right. For most strategic deals, the status quo (doing nothing, extending the current vendor, building in-house) wins more often than any named competitor. The template should force two sub-answers per competitor: where they are stronger than Strkr, and what the buyer has said about them. 'They are cheaper' from a procurement email is a different signal from 'they are cheaper' as a rep's guess. The Sales Leader uses this field to spot the deals where competitive risk is real versus where the rep is projecting fear. Deals with the status quo listed as the top competitor need a different play than deals with a named vendor.
Below the MEDDPICC spine, the template needs two action-forcing fields. The first is Risk: the single most likely reason this deal does not close on the stated date. Reps hate this field at first because it feels like admitting weakness. After two quarters, they realize it protects their forecast credibility and they fill it out honestly. The second is Next Step: a specific, dated, confirmed action with a named buyer-side participant. 'Follow up with legal' is not a next step. 'Working session with Lisa Park in Legal on Thursday 2pm Pacific to review redlines' is a next step. The Sales Leader scans this field in every review. A deal with a vague next step is a deal that will slip, and the template surfaces that signal before the slip happens.
A template that lives in a Google Doc dies within a quarter. The only template that survives is one encoded directly on the opportunity record, with required fields, validation rules, and a review view that renders them in reading order. In Strkr, build the template as a layout on the Opportunity object: group MEDDPICC on the left, Risk and Next Step on the right, and surface the whole thing in a saved view called Deal Review that managers open in every 1:1. Make the Metrics baseline, target, Economic Buyer, and Champion fields required at the stage where the deal becomes commit-eligible. Fields the rep leaves blank block stage advancement. Strkr AI can draft Risk and Next Step suggestions from recent activity, but the rep still owns the final text; AI drafts a starting point, not a signoff.
The template is only as good as the cadence that uses it. Every rep walks their top five deals plus everything above the dollar threshold with their manager weekly, same time, same agenda. Manager pulls up the Deal Review view, scans Risk and Next Step first, then challenges one MEDDPICC field per deal, rotating which one. This keeps reps from gaming any single field. Monthly, the Sales Leader pulls the last ninety days of closed-won and closed-lost and audits the template completeness: did the deals that closed have fully completed templates, and did the slipped deals show the slip signals the template was supposed to catch. Quarterly, retire fields that reps consistently leave blank or that did not predict outcomes. The template is a living artifact, not a plaque.
The Sales Leader owns the template, front-line managers enforce it, and AEs fill it in on every strategic deal. Revenue Operations partners with the Sales Leader on the encoded CRM layout and the audit cadence. If anyone else tries to add a field, the request goes through the Sales Leader so the surface stays small and consistent across the team.
No. Reserve the full template for strategic deals above a dollar threshold your Sales Leader sets based on average deal size, plus every rep's top five. Transactional deals under the threshold run a lighter BANT-style version. Overloading velocity deals with eight MEDDPICC fields produces copy-paste answers and burns rep time that should be spent prospecting.
The deal review template is internal: it captures what the rep knows about the deal for manager review. A mutual action plan is external and jointly owned with the buyer: it is the dated sequence of steps both sides commit to between now and signature. Use both. The template feeds the forecast; the mutual action plan drives the close.
Short enough that a rep can update it in ten minutes before a 1:1 and a manager can scan it in two. For MEDDPICC that lands at roughly fifteen structured fields plus a Risk statement and a Next Step. Anything longer and reps either leave fields blank or fill them with filler text that defeats the purpose.
Strkr AI drafts starting-point text for Risk, Next Step, and sometimes Competition based on recent emails, meeting notes, and activity. The rep reviews and edits every field before saving. AI accelerates the first draft and surfaces signals the rep may have missed; it does not replace the rep's judgment or the manager's challenge.
The required-field setup in the CRM blocks stage advancement until the template is complete. The deal cannot be marked commit until Metrics, Economic Buyer, Champion, and Next Step are filled with real content. Managers who enforce this consistently see template compliance hit ninety percent inside one quarter, and forecast error drops with it.
Strkr turns your deal review template into required opportunity fields, blocking stage advancement when evidence is missing and surfacing risk before deals slip. Managers scan one view in every 1:1 and leaders commit the forecast with confidence.
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