You will be able to explain how a documented process supports coaching, forecasting and onboarding.
Ask three reps on your team what "proposal stage" means, and you may get three answers. One means the proposal has been sent. Another means the buyer has asked for one. A third means they are thinking about writing one. All three deals sit in the same column of the CRM, and your forecast adds them together as if they were the same thing.
That is what a team without a written sales process looks like from the inside. Everyone sells, many of them sell well, and nobody can quite compare one person's pipeline with another's. This module is about writing the process down. This lesson is about why it is worth the effort.
A sales process is the agreed series of stages a deal moves through, with a clear test for when a deal has moved from one stage to the next and the main activities that move it. It is written down, short, and used by everyone on the team.
Without one, each rep's pipeline is a private language. When Wei Ming first ran a forecast as manager, Raj's pipeline showed six deals at proposal stage and Aisha's showed two. It looked as if Raj was further ahead. When Wei Ming asked about each deal, four of Raj's six had not yet received a proposal. Raj moved deals to the proposal stage when the buyer said "send me something". Aisha moved them only after she had walked the buyer through the proposal in a meeting.
Neither was wrong, exactly. But the forecast treated a deal where the buyer had read and discussed a proposal the same as one where the buyer had asked for a document in passing. The first kind closed far more often. Any forecast built on those stages was guesswork, and module 5 will show how much a forecast depends on stages meaning the same thing for every deal.
Without a written process, coaching drifts towards "do it the way I did". Wei Ming was a good seller, and his way worked for him. It was built around his personality: he talked fast, built rapport quickly and pushed for decisions early. When he coached Mei Ling, who is quieter and more careful, telling her to do it his way did not help.
A written process gives you something to coach to that is not personal. Instead of "you should have pushed harder", the conversation becomes "the process says we confirm the budget before sending a proposal. Did that happen here?" The rep can check the standard for themselves, and two reps with different styles can both meet it. Module 6 builds on this by tying each coaching point to a stage of the process.
In lesson 3.2, The first 30 days: product, process, people, Hui Min learned the sales process before the product. That only works if the process exists somewhere other than in people's heads. When it does not, a new hire has to piece it together from shadowing, and they end up with a version of whoever they shadowed most.
Wei Ming's notes from Hui Min's weekly check-ins showed she was twice unsure when a lead counted as qualified. Nobody had written it down. Aisha knew, Daniel knew, and they did not quite agree with each other. A written process with exit criteria would have answered her question in one line.
The most common mistake is writing the process you wish the team followed. A manager reads a sales book, designs an eight-stage process with three approval steps and a mandatory qualification form, and launches it at a team meeting. Within a month, the reps are filling in the form after the deal closes, and the CRM is less accurate than before.
The process should describe what your better reps already do when deals go well. Start by asking them. Look at deals that were won and trace the steps the buyer and the rep took. You will find most of the process already exists. What is missing is that it is shared and written down.
You can tighten it later. Once the team uses a process that matches reality, you can add a step where you see deals often getting lost. But the first version should feel familiar to your best reps. If it feels like a new set of rules, it will be ignored.
Lessons 4.2 and 4.3 cover how to define the stages and the activities. Lesson 4.4 puts them on one page.
Before you write anything, find out how your team actually sells today. The quickest way is to ask reps to describe the steps of a deal they won recently, from first contact to signature, in their own words. Ask them what the buyer did at each point as well as what they did.
Wei Ming asked Aisha, Raj and Daniel. All three described a first meeting and a proposal. Only Aisha described a separate meeting to confirm the problem and its cost before writing anything. Daniel always met the finance person before sending pricing. Raj went straight from first meeting to proposal. Three won deals, three routes. The differences told Wei Ming where the written process would need to make a choice.
In the activity below you will do the same with three of your own reps. Write their stories down step by step, side by side, so that the places where they differ are easy to see.
Ask three reps to describe the steps of their last won deal and note where their stories differ.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).