The Sales Process

Ask most owners to describe their sales process and you get a description of their sales behaviour. An enquiry arrives, they speak to the person, they send something over, they chase a bit, sometimes it lands. That is not a process. That is a habit with good intentions attached.

A sales process is a written, named sequence of stages from first contact to signature, where each stage has a test that must be passed before anyone moves on, and a date attached to the next action. It is deliberately boring. Boring is what makes it repeatable, measurable and transferable to somebody who is not you.

What a stage actually is

This is where most attempts fall over. Owners name stages after things they have done. Quote sent. Followed up. Waiting to hear. Every one of those describes an action by you and tells you nothing about whether the sale is alive.

A stage is a change in the buyer's state, and its exit test is what must be true about them before you move on. Not proposal sent, but proposal walked through with the person who signs. Not qualified, but they have described a problem, agreed roughly what it costs them, and confirmed who else is involved in the decision.

Get that right and your pipeline stops being a list of hopes. Every opportunity is sitting somewhere specific, and you can see exactly which door people fail to get through.

Why it matters to an owner

Three reasons, and only one of them is about revenue.

First, you cannot fix what you cannot see. Without stages you have one number, the win rate, and it tells you nothing about where the loss happens. With stages you have five numbers, and one of them is almost always dramatically worse than the others.

Second, you cannot delegate what is not written. The day you want somebody else handling enquiries, a process is the only thing you have to hand them. Talent is not transferable. A path is.

Third, and this is the one owners forget, a buyer will not buy a business whose sales function is a person. If everything runs through you, the value of the company drops the moment you consider stepping back.

Where it usually breaks

The qualification bar is too low. Everyone who makes contact is treated as a prospect, so the pipeline fills with people who were never going to buy, and the whole business feels busy and hopeful while very little closes. A full pipeline is not a healthy one. Half the value of stage two is the permission it gives you to say no early and go and find someone better.

Nobody has established who decides. You have a good meeting with a person who then has to sell your proposal internally, on your behalf, using notes they took while you talked. They will not do it as well as you would, and you will never know why it went quiet. The exit test for the diagnosis stage should always include the names of everyone involved in the decision.

The gap between meeting and proposal is too long. Enthusiasm has a half-life of about a week. If your proposal takes nine days to write because it is a bespoke document assembled from scratch every time, you are losing deals to your own admin. Build the thing from components so it goes out in 48 hours.

A worked example

Illustrative numbers, chosen to make the arithmetic clear. Take a business with 100 enquiries in a quarter, an average first order of £6,500, and the flow shown in the diagram: 100 enquiries, 68 qualified, 41 meetings, 30 proposals, 11 wins. That is £71,500 of new business and a win rate on enquiries of 11 per cent.

The instinctive response is to buy more enquiries. Twenty per cent more enquiries, if everything else holds, produces roughly two more wins and £14,300, and costs whatever the marketing costs.

Now look at the leaks instead. Twenty-seven qualified people never got a meeting booked. Not rejected, not unqualified. Just never booked, because nothing in the system forced a date into a diary. Turning half of those into meetings, at the same downstream rates, adds around 10 meetings, 7 proposals and roughly 2.5 wins. That is about £16,000, and it costs nothing but a rule.

Then look at proposals. Thirty out, eleven won, 37 per cent. Move that to 50 per cent by presenting proposals live rather than emailing them, and by booking the decision conversation before the proposal is written, and you get 15 wins instead of 11. Another £26,000, again for no additional spend.

Same quarter, same enquiries, same team. Roughly £42,000 more from two structural changes, against £14,300 from buying a fifth more leads. That is the argument for having a process, in pounds.

How to apply it this week

1. Write the stages on one page. Five or six, no more. Name them after what has become true for the buyer, not what you have sent.
2. Give every stage an exit test. One sentence. If you cannot write a test, the stage is not real and should be merged with its neighbour.
3. Count the last three months. How many enquiries, how many meetings, how many proposals, how many wins. Most owners cannot do this from memory, and finding that out is itself the finding.
4. Find the biggest single drop and fix only that. Not all of them. The worst gap is usually somewhere unglamorous, like nobody booking a follow-up date in the room.
5. Make one rule and hold it. Nothing leaves a meeting without the next date agreed. Or: no proposal is emailed without a scheduled walk-through. One rule, enforced, beats a new CRM.
6. Run a 20-minute pipeline review every week. By stage, not by hope. The only questions are what stage it is at, what the exit test is, and what date the next action has.

The mistake most owners make

They buy software and think they have bought a process. A CRM is a filing cabinet with reminders. If the stages inside it are named after your admin, all you have done is digitise a bad habit and add data entry to it.

The second mistake is treating follow-up as a stage. Follow-up is what fills the space where a process should be. If somebody is in follow-up, it means the last conversation ended without a decision or a date, which means the stage before it did not have an exit test.

The third is tolerating the maybe. A maybe costs more than a no, because it stays in the forecast, it consumes attention, and it lets everyone feel busy. A process that permits maybes is not a process, it is a waiting room.

The questions to sit with

• Out of 10, how confident are you that two people in your business would describe the sales process identically?
• Where exactly did your last ten losses drop out, and do you actually know?
• How many live opportunities have no next date in a diary right now?
• If you stopped selling personally for a month, what would happen, and what does that tell you?

This is the backbone of the Sales & Marketing Engine and the first thing the Sales & Marketing Audit looks for. Most businesses do not have a sales problem. They have the same conversation, run slightly differently every time, and no way of knowing which version worked.