You will produce a one-page sales process the team can use from next week.
You now have stages named after buyer actions, two exit criteria for each, and the activities and templates that move a deal along. They are probably spread across a notebook, a document and a few messages to yourself. Before the team can use any of it, it has to fit on one page, and it has to survive contact with real deals.
This exercise does both. You will put the process on a single page, test it by placing ten live deals into stages with your reps, fix whatever the test exposes, and agree with the team when you will look at it again.
Lay the process out as a table or a set of columns, one per stage, in order. Under each stage name, write three things: the exit criteria, the two or three activities that move a deal forward, and the templates that go with them.
Use short phrases. "Decision maker named in CRM" works better than a sentence explaining why decision makers matter. Anything that will not fit probably belongs in your training material.
Wei Ming's page had four columns: meeting agreed, problem confirmed, proposal seen and terms agreed. Each column had two exit criteria at the top, two or three activities in the middle and the linked templates at the bottom. A line across the bottom said that won and lost are outcomes, and that a lost deal needs a one-line reason in the CRM.
If your page is crowded, check the number of stages before you shrink the font. Lesson 4.2, Stages and exit criteria from the buyer's side, suggested four to six open stages for most teams.
The real test of a process is whether two people, looking at the same deal, put it in the same stage. Pick ten current deals from across the team, a mix of early and late, large and small. For each one, ask the rep who owns it to place it using only the page. Then place it yourself, separately, from the CRM notes and what you know of the deal.
Do this deal by deal and write both answers down. Do not discuss them yet.
Wei Ming took ten deals from Aisha, Raj, Daniel and Mei Ling. Hui Min had no open deals yet, but he asked her to place three of them too, as a test of whether someone new to the team could use the page.
Put the answers side by side. For most deals you and the rep will agree. Where you disagree, the question is not who is right. It is which part of the page allowed two readings.
Wei Ming and his reps disagreed on three of the ten deals.
On two, the rep placed the deal at proposal seen and Wei Ming placed it at problem confirmed. In both, a proposal had been emailed and the buyer had replied "thanks, will review". The reps counted that as seen. Wei Ming did not. The exit criterion for problem confirmed was clear enough, but the stage name "proposal seen" let both readings through. They changed the stage definition to say the buyer has discussed the proposal with the rep, in a meeting or a call, and the activity to say the rep books that discussion before sending the document.
The third was Daniel's. He put a deal at proposal seen, and Wei Ming put it at problem confirmed. Daniel had walked the buyer through a proposal, but nobody yet knew who would make the final decision. On the page, the decision maker test sat at the bottom of its column where it looked like part of the next stage, so Daniel had read it as something to sort out later. They moved it to the top of the problem confirmed column and reworded it as a condition for leaving that stage.
Hui Min placed her three deals the same way Wei Ming had, after the fixes. That was a good sign the page could be used by someone who had not helped write it.
Record each change you make and why. That record becomes part of your capstone, and it is useful at the first quarterly review.
Present the page at your next team meeting. Walk through it stage by stage, explain the changes you made after the test, and ask for objections now rather than quiet workarounds later.
Then agree a date for the first review. Lesson 4.3, Key activities and tools for each stage, suggested every quarter. For a brand-new process, an earlier first check, after four to six weeks, catches problems while they are small. Wei Ming set his for six weeks out, with the next one at the start of the following quarter.
Make the page easy to find. Pin it in the team channel, attach it to the CRM, print it if your team works from a shared office.
You should finish with three things: a one-page sales process with stages, exit criteria, activities and templates; a record of the ten deals showing where you and the reps placed each one; and a short list of the changes you made and why. That set is the capstone for module 4.
Expect to change the page again. A process that fits on one page and that your reps place deals into the same way is good enough to start with.
The activity below asks you to write your one-page process and test it on ten live deals. Pick the ten deals before you sit down with the reps, so nobody chooses only the easy ones.
Write a one-page sales process, test it on ten live deals and record the changes you made.
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