You will be able to define stages by what the buyer has done, not by what the seller hopes.
Look at the stage names in most CRMs: prospecting, qualifying, proposing, negotiating, closing. Every one of them describes what the seller is doing. None of them tells you anything about the buyer. A rep can be "negotiating" with a buyer who has stopped answering emails, and the CRM will happily show the deal at 80 percent done.
This lesson turns that around. You will define your stages by what the buyer has done, and write a short test for each stage that anyone on the team could check.
When a stage is named after a seller activity, the rep decides when the deal moves, based on how they feel about it. When a stage is named after something the buyer did, the deal moves only when there is evidence.
Compare "proposal" with "proposal seen". The first can mean almost anything, as Wei Ming found in lesson 4.1, Why a written process makes everything else work. The second means the buyer has actually looked at the proposal, ideally in a meeting where you walked them through it, which is the approach in Present, handle objections, and close, lesson 2.3, Walk the buyer through it instead of emailing it.
Wei Ming's team settled on four open stages, each named after a buyer action:
Meeting agreed: the buyer has accepted a first meeting. Problem confirmed: the buyer has agreed there is a problem worth solving and roughly what it costs them. Proposal seen: the buyer has seen and discussed a written proposal. Terms agreed: the buyer has accepted the price and terms, and only paperwork or approval remains.
After those come won and lost, which are outcomes and not stages a deal sits in.
Notice what is not on the list. There is no "prospecting" stage, because a contact who has not agreed to anything is not a deal yet. That activity belongs in the prospecting work covered in Prospecting: build a pipeline that does not run dry.
A stage name tells you roughly where a deal is. Exit criteria are the specific things that must be true before a deal moves to the next stage. They turn a judgement into a checklist.
Good exit criteria can be checked by someone who was not in the room. "Buyer is interested" fails that test, because interest is a feeling. "A decision maker is named in the CRM" passes, because you can look. So do "a budget range has been discussed and noted" and "a decision date has been agreed with the buyer".
Wei Ming wrote two exit criteria for each stage, which is enough to stop most wrong moves without turning the CRM into paperwork. To leave meeting agreed, the first meeting has taken place and the buyer has described at least one problem in their own words. To leave problem confirmed, the person who will decide is named, and a budget range has been discussed. To leave proposal seen, the buyer has given specific feedback on the proposal, and a decision date has been agreed. To leave terms agreed, the contract has been signed, or the buyer has said no.
Raj's six "proposal" deals would have looked different under these rules. In four of them the buyer had not yet seen a proposal, so at best they belonged at problem confirmed. Two of those four had no named decision maker either, so they could not move on until Raj found out who would decide. His pipeline was not smaller than he thought, but it was much earlier.
There is a pull towards adding stages. Each one seems sensible on its own: a stage for "demo done", one for "trial running", one for "legal review". Before long the team has nine stages, nobody can name them all, and deals get moved in bulk at the end of the month because nobody updates them as things happen.
Aim for a number that reps can recite without looking at a chart. For many teams that is four to six open stages. If you need more detail inside a stage, put it in the activities for that stage, which lesson 4.3, Key activities and tools for each stage, covers.
A useful test: ask a rep to name the stages and the exit criteria for one of them from memory. If they cannot, there are too many, or the names are not clear enough.
Most of the work that moves a deal from meeting agreed to problem confirmed is discovery: asking the questions that find the real problem, its cost and who decides. This course does not teach those skills. They are covered in Discovery: questions that find the real problem, including qualification frameworks such as BANT and MEDDIC in module 5 of that course. As a manager, your job is to make sure the exit criteria reflect what good discovery produces, so a deal cannot reach proposal seen without it.
In the activity below you will write your own team's stages with two checkable exit criteria for each. Start from the stories you collected from your reps in lesson 4.1, and name each stage after what the buyer did at that point in their won deals.
Write your team's stages with two checkable exit criteria for each.
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