Learn the cross-functional Deal Accelerator Workshop method used by revenue leaders to unstick enterprise deals and scale coaching across sales teams.
For enterprise sales leaders, few things are more frustrating than watching "good on paper" deals stall late in the pipeline after the opportunity is qualified, the champion is engaged, and there’'s no clear explanation about what's happening—especially when sales cycles have lengthened 22% since 2022.
For VPs of Sales, CROs, and Heads of Enterprise Sales, this scenario creates three challenges:
Rather than asking for basic status updates or surface-level questions (as a traditional deal review meeting would), Deal Accelerator Workshops are used to help organizations win by changing both who is involved in deal problem-solving and how stalled opportunities are evaluated.
In this article, we’ll explore what Deal Accelerator Workshops are and how they help revenue teams close complex opportunities faster and more predictably.
Let’s dive in!
A deal accelerator workshop is a cross-functional meeting designed to help sales teams unstick stalled deals and close enterprise opportunities faster.
Instead of a traditional deal review that only checks pipeline status, a Deal Accelerator Workshop brings together people from sales, marketing, product, customer success, finance, legal, and leadership to look at one specific deal and figure out why it’s not moving forward. The group reviews the customer’s goals, pain points, decision makers, and value alignment, then collaborates on clear next steps to move the deal toward close.
By using shared expertise across the organization, Deal Accelerator Workshops improve deal review best practices, increase visibility into deal risk, and drive stronger cross-functional sales collaboration. The result is faster deal progression, better customer alignment, and more predictable enterprise sales outcomes.
Vanessa Brangwyn, VP of Sales at Motus, runs Deal Accelerator Workshops whenever a large enterprise deal gets stuck. “We bring together a cross-functional team — with representation from product, marketing, legal, finance, customer success and implementation, as well as fellow sales reps and leaders — to really go deep on a deal,” Vanessa explains.
During each session, the team reviews the deal’s high-level context, key customer personas, pain points, value proposition, and what’s already been tried. From there, the workshop shifts into an open brainstorming phase, where no idea is off-limits. “Even if you’re the rep and you’ve already tried every suggestion,” Vanessa adds, “the act of sharing and collaborating often sparks new creativity and reveals new paths to move the deal forward.”
Deal Accelerator Workshops aren’t meant for every opportunity. They’re most effective when triggered intentionally.
Common indicators include:
These triggers help leaders deploy workshops where they’ll have the greatest impact, without turning them into another recurring meeting.
One of the most powerful outcomes of a Deal Accelerator Workshop is its ability to break down sales silos and turn deal execution into a true team effort.
“"It helps the entire business see themselves as part of the sales function," explains Vanessa Brangwyn, VP of Sales at Motus. "Sales isn't a silo. It takes the proverbial village to win, especially with our largest, most strategic opportunities." This approach aligns with research showing companies with collaborative cultures are twice as likely to be profitable.
Rather than leaving sellers to troubleshoot complex enterprise deals on their own, Deal Accelerator Workshops intentionally bring multiple functions into the conversation to enable multithreading when a deal is stuck and fresh perspective is needed most.
Each Deal Accelerator Workshop follows a structured review designed to uncover hidden risks and opportunities. The team works through:
“Even our CEO attends these workshops when he can, which really underscores the collective hunger to not just win deals for the sake of winning, but to do right by the customer,” says Vanessa. “A representative from the enablement team also sits in on every workshop to identify patterns and areas for improvement. It helps us pinpoint themes. For example, if 75% of our deals are stalling at the same stage, we can identify that trend and create resources or training to help the entire team navigate it more effectively.”
With this shared context established, the workshop moves into open, cross-functional brainstorming. Product may identify a new use case, finance may suggest alternative commercial structures, customer success may surface implementation insights, and marketing may recommend messaging that better resonates with executive buyers.
Because there’s no hierarchy in the brainstorming phase and no “bad ideas,” teams surface insights that a single sales rep (or even a sales manager) would rarely uncover alone. This results in clear, actionable next steps.
Most deal review meetings fail because they focus on reporting activity rather than analyzing why a deal is stuck. Reps walk through CRM fields, managers ask about next steps, and everyone leaves with more information, but no new clarity.
An effective deal review meeting flips that dynamic. Instead of starting with the forecast, it starts with the customer.
This customer-centric approach focuses on the customer’s reality, versus the seller's assumptions. Before discussing close dates or internal pressure, leaders pause to ask whether the deal still matters to the buyer and why.
The team must clearly articulate the customer’s business problem and urgency. If that foundation is weak, everything built on top of it will be too.
Sales leaders running deal reviews focus on questions such as:
These questions force the team to move beyond generic pain statements and surface whether the deal is anchored to a real, time-bound priority. Often, this is where stalled deals begin to make sense. The customer’s pain may have changed, urgency may have faded, or the problem may never have been as critical as assumed.
By grounding the deal review in the customer’s perspective first, leaders gain immediate insight into deal risk. They also create a shared understanding across sales, leadership, and cross-functional partners about whether the opportunity is worth continued investment, or whether it needs to be repositioned or disqualified.
When enterprise deals stall late in the cycle, the instinct is often to push harder with more follow-ups, more demos, and more internal pressure on the rep. But in reality, most stalled deals aren’t stuck because of a lack of activity. They’re stuck because something fundamental has shifted, changed, or was never fully understood in the first place.
This is where Deal Accelerator Workshops play a critical role.
Rather than treating stalled deals as isolated sales issues, the workshop reframes them as organizational problem-solving moments. The goal isn’t to assign blame or apply pressure, it’s to uncover what’s missing.
At this stage, sales leaders and cross-functional partners revisit the deal with fresh eyes, asking questions like:
These conversations often surface hidden blockers that aren’t visible in the CRM such as a new executive stakeholder, internal politics on the customer side, uncertainty around rollout, or a lack of confidence in the business case. When these issues remain unaddressed, deals slow quietly until they eventually disappear.
By intentionally pausing to reassess the opportunity through a Deal Accelerator Workshop, revenue leaders give their teams permission to rethink the deal—critical since 60% of underperforming sales teams cite poor collaboration as their key challenge. Sometimes that results in a new strategy that re-energizes the opportunity. Other times, it leads to a confident decision to walk away, freeing up resources for deals that are more likely to close.
Either outcome improves forecast accuracy, deal velocity, and team focus.
A Deal Accelerator Workshop is only valuable if it produces clear output that helps the team determine the best way to move forward.
A successful workshop produces the following:
Each output has a clear owner and next action. The workshop concludes with explicit accountability for who is doing what and when so momentum continues after the meeting ends.
Here’s the bottom line: if you want enterprise deals to move faster through your pipeline, you have to change how stalled deals are solved, not just push them harder.
Cross-functional Deal Accelerator Workshops address the real causes of delay. By bringing sales, product, finance, legal, and customer success into the same conversation, teams surface hidden blockers earlier, validate who truly holds buying power, and realign the value story to what matters most right now for the customer.
Instead of weeks of fragmented back-and-forth across functions, critical questions get answered in a single session. Decisions happen faster. Execution becomes coordinated. And teams either move forward with clarity, or confidently walk away.
The result is shorter time-to-decision, fewer late-stage resets, and more predictable outcomes. That’s how enterprise organizations compress deal cycles by as much as 40%— not by pushing harder, but by solving the right problems together.
