Deal
Management

Deal management is the practice of running every opportunity on evidence rather than hope. In the book, David Weiss presents it as an operating system: you assess each deal against six criteria, grade what you actually know with color coding, and take specific actions to close the gaps while there is still time. It works inside your existing sales process, so you do not need to redesign your stages to start using it.

The book argues that every B2B deal rests on six criteria: Current State (the verified, quantified reality today), Desired Future State (a concrete picture of what better looks like), Change Justification (why they will prioritize change now rather than later or never), Stakeholders (every buying and influence center the decision needs), Buying Process (the real path to signature, including legal and procurement), and Competition (everything competing for the change, including the status quo).

It is not a replacement methodology. Weiss credits MEDDPICC as the start of his own journey, but the book is methodology-agnostic: it works with MEDDICC, MEDDPICC, Challenger, SPIN, Sandler, or no formal methodology at all. Each criteria chapter shows how those frameworks label the same idea. Deal Management sits on top as the connecting layer, adding color coding, plays, and operating rhythms so the methodology you already have gets used in live deals.

Each criterion is graded by the strength of the evidence behind it. Red means you don't know and the information is missing. Yellow means you think you know but it is still an assumption the buyer hasn't validated, or there is a known misalignment you are accepting as risk. Green means you know and can prove it with names, dates, numbers, documents, or explicit confirmation. Red and yellow aren't bad; calling something green when it isn't is.

Anyone who carries a number, leads people who do, or supports them: account executives, sales managers, revenue leaders and CROs, sales engineers and solution consultants, and enablement and RevOps teams. Individual sellers are encouraged to read it front to back. Sales leaders are pointed to the About the Book section first, then straight to Section 3 on operating rhythms, and back to Sections 1 and 2 as coaches.

No. The book applies to any complex B2B sale, whether you sell software, services, hardware, or something else, as long as deals involve multiple stakeholders and medium to long buying cycles. The six criteria stay the same at every deal size. What changes is the evidence bar and the stakeholder complexity: smaller deals move faster because fewer people need to align, while larger deals take more loops through discovery and demo.

The book recommends a crawl, walk, run approach instead of launching everything at once. Start with the six criteria and color coding, with the team grading a few live deals together. In month one, require color-coded prep for 1:1s and deal reviews. In months two and three, tighten forecast definitions so nothing is Commit unless it is green across all criteria. By quarter two, it becomes the shared language of 1:1s, deal reviews, forecast calls, and QBRs.

Deal Management is available in hardcover (ISBN 979-8-9955851-4-5) and as a Kindle ebook, both on Amazon. It was published on June 1, 2026, under the DealDoc imprint. There is no paperback edition. The book also points readers to companion resources at dealmanagement.co, including color coding cheat sheets, business case and mutual action plan templates, and one-page checklists for each deal criterion.