You will be able to list the activities that move a deal from one stage to the next.
A rep has a deal sitting at problem confirmed for five weeks. In the pipeline review you ask what is happening, and they say they are waiting for the buyer to get back to them. You ask what they could do to move it, and there is a pause. They know the deal needs to reach proposal seen. They are not sure what gets it there.
Stages and exit criteria tell a rep where a deal is and what has to be true before it moves. They do not say how to move it. This lesson adds the last layer: the activities that most often carry a deal from one stage to the next, and the tools the team already has for doing them.
For each stage, list the two or three activities that most often move a deal forward. Keep it to the ones that make the biggest difference. A list of twelve possible actions is a training manual, and nobody will read it during a busy week.
The best source is again your won deals. Look at what happened between each stage in deals that went well. Wei Ming went back to the stories he collected in lesson 4.1, Why a written process makes everything else work, and to the CRM notes on the last ten won deals.
For meeting agreed, two activities came up again and again: sending a short agenda the day before the first meeting, and asking the buyer to bring whoever handles payroll today. Deals where the payroll person came to the first meeting reached problem confirmed much more often in his notes.
For problem confirmed, the activities were a second meeting to put a cost on the problem with the buyer, which is the method in Discovery: questions that find the real problem, lesson 4.2, Put a number on the impact, with the buyer, and a short call with the finance person before any pricing went out. That second activity was the one Daniel always did and Raj never did.
For proposal seen, the main activity was walking the buyer through the proposal in a meeting rather than emailing it, followed by a written summary of the buyer's feedback.
For terms agreed, the work was sending the contract within a day and agreeing a start date for onboarding, so the buyer had something to look forward to after signing.
Most teams already have templates scattered around: a meeting agenda someone wrote two years ago, a proposal format in a shared drive, a follow-up email that Aisha uses and nobody else knows about. Collect them and attach each one to the stage where it is used.
Do not write new ones at this point. The aim is to make what already works easy to find. If the team has three proposal formats, pick the one your best reps use, or the one that wins most often, and retire the others. If a stage has no template and clearly needs one, note it as a gap to fill later.
Wei Ming's list had four items: the first meeting agenda, a one-page cost-of-the-problem worksheet Aisha had built, the standard proposal format, and the contract cover email. He linked each one beside its stage in the process document.
The process only helps the forecast if the CRM uses the same stages with the same meaning. If the written process has four stages and the CRM has seven left over from an old setup, reps will translate between them, and every translation is a place where meaning slips.
Rename the CRM stages to match your written ones, and where your CRM allows it, add the exit criteria as required fields or a checklist that must be ticked before a deal moves. Keep the required fields few. Two per stage, matching your exit criteria, is plenty. More than that and reps start entering anything to get past the screen.
When Wei Ming changed the CRM, he also moved every open deal into the new stages in one session with each rep, using the exit criteria. This was the same exercise that lesson 4.4 will ask you to do with ten deals, and it showed up the same disagreements.
If your team uses a spreadsheet instead of a CRM, the same rule applies: one column for stage, using exactly the stage names in the process, and columns for the exit criteria.
A process written once and never touched slowly drifts away from what the team actually does. Buyers change, products change, and reps find better ways of moving deals that never make it into the document.
Put a review in the calendar every quarter with the whole team. Keep it to an hour. Look at where deals have been getting stuck, ask reps which activities they have found that work better, and check whether any exit criterion is being ignored because it does not fit. Change what needs changing, and tell the team what changed and why.
Wei Ming set his first review for the first Monday of the next quarter, straight after the pipeline review. Module 8 will give him numbers to bring to it: the conversion rate between each pair of stages, which shows exactly where deals are leaking.
In the activity below you will add the main activities and the existing templates to each stage of the process you drafted in lesson 4.2. Use what your won deals show, and leave any gaps marked so you can come back to them.
Add key activities and templates to each stage of your process.
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