I've sat in a lot of American deal reviews. Austin, Chicago, New York, Salt Lake City. The rooms where the top deals of the quarter get pulled apart in front of everyone.
The first one I sat in rattled me.
I'd come up in a sales culture where you protected your deals a little. Presented them at their best. Kept some optimism in the forecast. In the American review, that gets stripped away in the first two minutes. Where's the economic buyer. What's the close plan. Why is this still in commit if you can't answer that. No cruelty in it. Just a flat refusal to let a deal hide.
Watching it happen, deal after deal, I understood the rigor wasn't about pressure. It was about honesty. The forecast was a promise, not a hope, and the review existed to find the gap between the two before the customer did.
Most pipelines don't fail because the deals are bad. They fail because nobody asked the uncomfortable question early enough, out loud, in front of people.
I carried that into every market I worked in afterwards.
If you're a founder or sales leader selling into the US, or hiring someone who came up in that system, this is the part that's invisible from the outside. They won't just sell. They'll inspect. Be ready for it.