Audit before you sell. Call every open opportunity, confirm whether there is a live problem, a date, and a person who will take a meeting, then close out anything that fails. Expect to delete most of it. Meanwhile map the territory for real: existing customers, past closed-lost worth revisiting, and named accounts nobody has touched. A small honest pipeline in week four beats an inherited fiction.
Why interviewers ask this
This tests whether you have the discipline to shrink a number voluntarily, which is uncomfortable and rare. The interviewer wants to see a systematic approach to territory planning, not just activity, and to hear that you will surface a bad inheritance early instead of carrying someone else's optimism into your own forecast. They also want to know you mine closed-lost and existing customers rather than only cold accounts.
How to structure your answer
- Audit every inherited opportunity against a fixed test.
- Close out what fails and tell your manager the real number early.
- Segment the territory by revenue potential and existing relationships.
- Mine closed-lost and current customers before cold outreach.
- Set a weekly prospecting rhythm from day one.
Example answer
Weeks one and two I am not selling, I am auditing. Every open opportunity gets the same three-part test: is there a problem someone is actively trying to fix, is there a date the buyer owns, and will they take a meeting with me this month. Anything that fails all three gets closed out. In the last territory I took over, I killed about 60% of the inherited pipeline in three weeks, which was uncomfortable to report but meant everything I forecast afterwards was real. Then I segment. Existing customers first, because expansion is faster than acquisition and somebody has already agreed we work. Then closed-lost from the previous eighteen months, and I specifically look for the ones lost on timing or budget rather than on product, because those often just needed a different quarter. Then the named accounts nobody has ever touched. And I set the prospecting rhythm in week one rather than week five, because whatever I start in month one is what closes in month five.
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See how it worksFollow-up questions to expect
- How do you tell a new manager that most of their pipeline is fake?
- What makes a closed-lost deal worth reopening?
- How do you prioritize accounts inside a new territory?
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