Sales process and sales leadership
For companies ready to put a proper sales process and structure in place
Two to fifteen salespeople. Four phases: assess what is there, build the process, run it until it works, then hand it back in house.
How It Works
Four phases. Each one ends with a decision about whether to continue, so the commitment is one phase at a time.
Assess
About one month
Interviews with the owner and with each person in sales. A review of the CRM, the quote history, and recent wins and losses. Time spent sitting in on calls or customer visits.
Written findings and a ranked plan. Often the whole engagement.
Build
Two to three months
Stages defined from first contact through to close. Standards set for quoting turnaround and follow-up. The CRM configured to match the process. A pipeline and forecast that can be read without asking anyone.
A process the team uses, not a document.
Run
Typically three to six months
Half a day a week, remote or on site: the weekly sales meeting, one-on-ones with each salesperson, pipeline review, and a monthly report to the owner. A new process decays unless someone holds it through the first few months.
The process holds under real conditions.
Hand off
The process transfers to the owner or to someone internal, documented, with that person trained on running it. Agreed at the start of the engagement.
The engagement ends.
Enough structure to make execution and accountability possible, without turning good salespeople into administrators.
Sales grew by hiring, not by design.
People came in at different times, each with the way of selling they learned somewhere else. Nobody has had time to reconcile them. There is no “how we sell here,” so nothing can be coached, copied, or handed to a new person.
Sales still runs through the owner.
The pricing calls, the difficult conversations, and the important customers all come back to one person. That person becomes the ceiling on how much the company can sell.
The tools were bought but never fitted.
A CRM exists. It was set up from a template rather than around how this business actually sells, so people use it differently or work around it. The reports built on top of it are not trusted, and the money spent on it has not come back.
The gap between salespeople is wide and unexplained.
One or two produce and the others do not. With no common process there is nothing to compare them against, so it is not possible to say whether the issue is the person, the territory, or the method. That uncertainty is expensive, because nothing gets decided.
Something has just changed.
A sales manager has left. A strong salesperson has moved into the role and is finding it is a different job. A new product or market needs a different approach. Growth has outpaced the way sales was set up.
Who is this for?
The Sales process, stage by stage
Why Me
Twenty years in industrial technology and hardware, starting on the technical side and moving into sales. At Hexagon and u-blox: building and running global sales teams, introducing new products to market, setting sales strategy, running sales kickoffs, and putting CRM systems in place. Deals from around $50,000 to $15 million, sold direct and through partners.
Several of those years involved M&A, reviewing the sales process and the sales team of a company before acquisition and then implementing the changes once it came in. Comparing sales organizations side by side teaches you quickly which structures hold and which only look organized.
More recently, engaged directly by hardware companies to work on specific parts of their sales process.
No two of those sales organizations needed the same thing. The answer is always some mix of process, people and tools, with AI where it earns its place.
More about me
Thirty minutes is enough to tell whether there is something worth doing and whether the fit is right.