Updated: January 2025
We’ve all experienced it; our salesperson tells us about that big deal that’s as good as done. Their prospect is showing solid buying signals after they verified strong alignment and generated genuine interest.
But then, as the sales cycle progresses, there’s a noticeable shift in buyer engagement, leaving your seller baffled about why they’re losing traction.
If they fail to uncover the reasons behind the prospect’s change of heart, they’re likely to be ghosted. Those of us with years of sales experience know—you can’t win them all.
But if your sellers’ deals are stalling regularly, it’s time to take a closer look at the sales process they’re using.
Key Article Takeaways:
- Boost Deal Success: Tailor your sales process for better conversions and fewer stalled opportunities.
- Build Buyer Trust: Align with your buyer’s pace to strengthen relationships and close more deals.
- Plan with Confidence: Gain accurate sales forecasts to drive growth and exceed customer expectations.
Advantages of a Strategic Sales Process
A company’s sales process is probably the most important lever that delivers results.
It provides salespeople with a proven sales methodology to navigate their opportunities. Equally important, it provides the sales leader with conversion rate visibility to identify specific stages in the sales process that a seller may need coaching to avoid deals from dropping off.
Some sellers rely on post-it notes to navigate their sales process, while others follow the default steps preloaded in their Customer Relationship Management CRM system.
Those who reap the benefit of sales predictability are usually the ones that have taken the time to develop an intentional, customized sales process for their sales team to follow.
Getting Started
Too often I meet with companies who have adopted cookie-cutter CRM stages as their method of guiding a prospect. Avoid stalled deals by taking the appropriate steps that correlate to your unique sales environment.
If you’re starting from scratch in formalizing your sales process, start by researching what the typical buyer/seller interactions are leading up to the buying decision, whether the deal was won or not.
A good way to do this is by coaching your salespeople to ask themselves, “What were the common phases I saw my buyer process through to form their decision?”. These will become the stages within your sales process.
Using comprehensive, simple terminology that is common to your environment is key when documenting the underlying components of your roadmap.
To drive adoption, continually utilize your sales process language during 1-to-1 meetings with your sellers and during sales team meetings when you are focusing on sharpening sales skills. This will help your sales team master the steps quickly and turn the process into a game changer for success.
Here’s an example of the powerful impact a well-designed, adopted sales process can have…
Guiding clients through the development and implementation of a strategic sales process is a core area of my practice. It brings efficiency, control, and success to active opportunities in the sales pipeline almost immediately.
Expanding Sales Stages into a Sales Roadmap
Next, it’s time to define stated objectives for each stage of your sales process. Be careful not to confuse activities for a particular sales stage with its objective.
Think of the objective as the core purpose for each stage within your overall sales process. For example, following up with a prospect is an activity, but confirming they have budget allocation is an objective.
It is also important to lay out the key activities you’ll focus at each sales stage and key information you desire to collect from the buyer.
A critical element of effective sales process design is the assignment of an appropriate pass-through gate for each sales stage. This is the one thing to achieve that is more imperative than anything else before moving forward.
The pass-through gate item could be a key piece of information, confirmation of buyer positioning, etc. Its achievement assures you to be on the best footing possible before you progress onto the next stage of the sales process.
For example, a pass-through gate could be verifying that you are interacting with a contact who has signing authority versus an influencer appointed to collect bids.
Buyer/Seller Alignment
One of the largest ‘deal killers’ I see is when the seller is not aligned with their buyer. Often, the seller is moving too fast and is unaware that the buyer is lagging behind — for any number of reasons.
The seller needs to pace the sales process to the buyer’s readiness for each next step. When they don’t, the seller doesn’t come off as genuine, just focused on closing the deal quickly. Leaving that impression is sure to diminish relationship trust and slow down or kill the deal.
Create check-in points throughout your sales process to gauge how your buyer is processing the information they are taking in. Be curious by asking insightful, open-ended questions to explore how they are viewing your solution fit with their needs.
Create a relationship where the prospect feels comfortable verbalizing what they don’t like or what they may perceive as a stronger fit with a competitor. You cannot overcome objections you don’t know exist.
Predictability & Confidence
When your sellers have a strong understanding of deal positioning throughout the sales process, not only will they be in a better position to close an opportunity, but senior leadership will have a more predictable forecast to support growth planning.
In today’s labor shortage climate, reliable projections are essential for companies to take the necessary proactive steps to meet customers’ long-term expectations.
If you’d like to discuss additional ways your salespeople can sharpen their skills to generate and convert more leads, contact me at 321.229.8910 or [email protected].
I am part of a national group of Senior Sales Leaders who collaborate to share insights like the examples shown in this article. We formed because of our shared passion to help business leaders exponentially grow their revenue.