How to build a sales process for a small or midsize business, in 6 steps
- Write down how the sale happens today. Before designing the ideal process, record the real one: where leads come in, who talks to them, what usually happens between first contact and close. There's almost always a process — it just isn't written down, and each person runs a different version of it.
- Name stages after what the CUSTOMER did. “Proposal sent” is a stage; “negotiating” isn't, because nobody can say when a deal enters or leaves it. Stages named after a verifiable customer action are what later let you measure where deals are lost.
- Define the advance criterion for each stage. For each stage, one objective condition: what has to be true for the deal to move forward. Without it, the funnel becomes a queue sorted by age, and the close forecast reflects optimism instead of reality.
- Assign an owner to each stage. A stage without an owner is where deals stall. On a small team the owner can be the same person for every stage — what can't happen is the answer being “it depends.”
- Choose where the process will live. A spreadsheet works at first and stops working exactly when it starts to matter: once there's more than one rep and more than a dozen open deals. The CRM comes after the stages are defined, not before — configuring a tool on top of an undefined process just locks in the confusion.
- Pick your first three metrics. Three, not fifteen: open deals by stage, advance rate between stages and average time in each one. These tell you whether the structure is holding up. Everything else comes after these have been reviewed every week for a month.
The symptom: the company sells, but nobody can explain how
Plenty of companies reach meaningful revenue by improvising — through the founder's relationships, referrals or one great rep's persistence. It works until it stops working, and then nobody can point to what changed.
The clearest sign is this: if two people at the company describe the sales process differently, there's no process — there's habit.
What needs to be defined
Building a structure isn't creating bureaucracy. It's making a small set of decisions that today get made again, differently, in every deal.
- Funnel stages: how many there are, what each one means and where the opportunity enters
- Advance criteria: what has to be true for a lead to move to the next stage — not “I had a feeling it was hot”
- Records: what must be logged in the CRM, and what doesn't need to be
- Metrics: the few numbers that will be reviewed every week
- Routine: when the pipeline is reviewed, and by whom
Process first, tool second
It's common for companies to start by buying a CRM. The reverse order produces the familiar result: an expensive tool the team fills in poorly and nobody checks.
The CRM implements the process — it doesn't replace the decision about which process you want. Once the design is set, implementing the tool stops being an IT project and becomes a natural consequence.