List the activities that move a deal from one stage to the next.
A written sales process with stages and exit criteria tells a rep where a deal is and what must be true before it can move to the next stage. It does not tell the rep how to move it. The last layer of the process covers that: the activities that most often move a deal from one stage to the next, and the tools the team already has for doing them.
Take a rep whose deal has sat at problem confirmed for five weeks. In pipeline review they say they are waiting on the buyer. When asked what they could do to move it, they pause. They know the next stage is proposal seen, but they do not know what gets a deal there.
For each stage, list only the two or three activities that most often move a deal forward, the ones with the biggest impact. A list of twelve possible actions is effectively a training manual, and nobody reads it in a busy week.
The best source for these activities is your team's won deals. Look at what happened between each stage in the deals that went well, and note what keeps coming up.
Wei Ming leads sales at a payroll-related business. He went back to the won-deal stories he collected in lesson 4.1, "Why a written process makes everything else work", and read the CRM notes on the last ten won deals. His process has four stages: meeting agreed, problem confirmed, proposal seen and terms agreed. Against each one he wrote the activities that kept appearing:
Meeting agreed: send a short agenda the day before the first meeting, and ask the buyer to bring whoever currently handles payroll. In Wei Ming's notes, deals where the payroll person attended the first meeting reached problem confirmed much more often. Problem confirmed: hold a second meeting to put a cost on the problem together with the buyer, using the method from the course "Discovery: questions that find the real problem", lesson 4.2, "Put a number on the impact, with the buyer". Then have a short call with the finance person before any pricing is sent. That call was the activity Daniel always did and Raj never did. Proposal seen: walk the buyer through the proposal in a meeting instead of emailing it, then follow up with a written summary of the buyer's feedback. Terms agreed: send the contract within a day, and agree an onboarding start date so the buyer has something to look forward to after signing.
Most teams already have templates scattered around: an old meeting agenda someone wrote two years ago, a proposal format in a shared drive, a follow-up email that only one rep uses. On Wei Ming's team that email belonged to Aisha, and nobody else knew about it. Collect these and attach each one to the stage where it is used.
Do not write new templates yet. The aim is to make what already works easy to find. Where the team has several versions of the same thing, such as three proposal formats, keep the one the best reps use or the one that wins most often, and retire the others. If a stage clearly needs a template and has none, mark it as a gap to fill later.
Wei Ming's list came to four items: the first meeting agenda, Aisha's one-page cost-of-the-problem worksheet, 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 meanings. Say the written process has four stages and the CRM still has seven left over from an earlier setup. Reps then translate between the two every time they update a deal, and each translation is a place where meaning slips.
Rename the CRM stages to match the written ones. Where the CRM allows it, add the exit criteria as required fields or as a checklist that must be ticked before a deal can move. Keep the required fields few. Two per stage, matching the exit criteria, is plenty. With more than that, reps enter anything just to get past the screen.
If your team uses a spreadsheet instead of a CRM, the same rule applies. Have one stage column that uses exactly the stage names from the process, plus columns for the exit criteria.
Once the stages change, move every open deal into the new ones. Do this in one session with each rep, using the exit criteria to decide where each deal belongs. When Wei Ming changed his CRM and did this, the sessions brought out disagreements about where deals really were. Lesson 4.4 will bring out the same disagreements when it asks you to place ten deals into stages using the exit criteria.
A process that is written once and never touched drifts away from what the team actually does. Buyers change, products change, and reps find better methods that never get written in.
Hold a review every quarter with the whole team, and keep it to one hour. In it, look at where deals have been getting stuck and ask reps which activities they have found work better. Check whether any exit criterion is being ignored because it does not fit. Change what needs changing, then tell the team what changed and why.
Wei Ming scheduled 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 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.
For each stage of your process, add the key activities and the templates that go with them.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).