Francesco Gizzi
Sales
B2B sales process: how to structure it and make it repeatable
In many SMEs and startups the B2B sales process exists, but it lives in the founder's head. They are the one who knows which customers are worth chasing, when it is time to send a proposal, how much discount can be given, who to call when a deal stalls. While customers are few, it works perfectly well. In fact, it is often this personal skill that made the company grow in the first place.
The problem comes when the company wants to grow beyond the time one person has available. You hire a salesperson, then a second, and realize that explaining the product to them is not enough. They do not know when an opportunity is a good one, they do not know what to ask on a first call, and every important decision lands back on the founder's desk. Sales grow less than headcount.
In this article I talk about how to design the process: stages, exit criteria, roles, CRM and playbook. The goal is a repeatable process that a new salesperson can follow and that produces similar results regardless of who runs it.
Signs that the process still depends on one person
Before designing anything, it is worth understanding how much the current process is tied to individual people. These are the signs I see most often:
- salespeople ask the founder for permission on almost every proposal;
- two salespeople, facing the same customer, would ask different questions and propose different things;
- the founder still closes the best contracts, and the team handles the rest;
- a new salesperson takes many months before closing their first contract on their own;
- when the founder goes on holiday the pipeline slows down;
- nobody can explain precisely what distinguishes a "hot" deal from a "cold" one.
If you recognize yourself in three or more of these points, the process exists but it is not transferable. And a process that cannot be transferred cannot be improved systematically either, because every result depends on the person who achieved it.
Stages: design them around how the customer buys
The most common mistake when designing stages is starting from what the salesperson does: first contact, call, proposal sent, follow-up. They look like stages, but they describe activities. A useful process starts instead from how the customer makes the decision: they realize they have a problem, evaluate possible solutions, choose a supplier, get internal approval, sign.
The stages of your process should follow this path. In a B2B sale of medium complexity, five or six are usually enough, for example:
- Lead to qualify: we know who they are, we do not yet know whether they are a fit.
- Qualified: they match the ideal customer profile and have a plausible need.
- Need confirmed: the customer has acknowledged the problem and wants to evaluate a solution.
- Proposal under review: they have received an offer built around their case.
- Decision in progress: negotiation and internal approval are under way.
- Closed: won or lost, with the reason.
The fewer stages there are, the easier they are to use well. If a stage changes nothing in the way the salesperson works or the way management reads the numbers, it is probably not needed.
Exit criteria: the heart of the process
Stages on their own are not enough. Almost every company I meet has stages with sensible names in the CRM, but each salesperson interprets them in their own way. One moves the opportunity to "proposal" when they have booked the call, another when they have sent the quote. The result is a pipeline in which the same word means different things.
The solution is exit criteria: verifiable facts that must be true for an opportunity to move forward. Not opinions ("the customer seems interested"), but elements anyone can check. A few examples:
- from "qualified" to "need confirmed": the customer has described the problem, we know its impact and we know who is involved in the decision;
- from "need confirmed" to "proposal under review": we have agreed with the customer on scope, the rough size of the budget and a date to discuss the offer;
- from "proposal under review" to "decision in progress": the customer has confirmed that our offer is on the shortlist and has told us the approval steps.
Alongside the criteria, define for each stage the minimum information to be collected. It is the same information you would need to hand the deal over to a colleague tomorrow morning without losing anything. If the salesperson does not have it, the opportunity does not move forward. It is a simple rule, and it is the one that, more than any other, makes the process independent of individuals.
Roles and handoffs
A sales process involves more people than it seems. Marketing generates and filters some of the leads. The salesperson runs the deal. The founder or sales manager steps in at certain stages. The technical or delivery team is brought in for estimates and feasibility. Administration handles the contract and invoicing.
For each stage it is worth writing down who is responsible, who is involved and when. In a small company the same person may play several roles, and that is normal. What matters is that the roles are clear even when they sit with the same person. That makes it possible, one day, to separate them without redesigning everything.
Handoffs are the points where most value is lost. Two in particular:
- From marketing to sales: you need a shared definition of a qualified lead and a maximum response time.
- From sales to delivery: what was promised to the customer must reach the people who deliver it, in writing. Many satisfaction and renewal problems start here.
The founder's role, too, needs to be designed, not eliminated. They can stay involved in strategic deals or step in at a specific stage, for example the final presentation to decision makers. The difference is that their involvement becomes a choice built into the process, not a necessity every time.
CRM and playbook: where the process lives every day
The CRM must mirror the process
The CRM is not the process. It is the place where the process becomes visible. That is why it should be configured after deciding on stages and criteria, not before. The pipeline stages in the CRM must match the ones you have designed, the mandatory fields must correspond to the minimum information for each stage, and loss reasons must be a closed list, not a free-text field.
A CRM configured this way becomes easier to update, because it asks only for what is needed. And it returns comparable data, because everyone enters it following the same rules. If your CRM today is an archive nobody enjoys updating, CRM and sales pipeline consulting can start from exactly this match between process and tool.
The playbook makes the method transferable
The sales playbook is the document that explains how to work at each stage. It does not need to be a hundred-page manual. A good playbook for an SME runs to a few pages and contains:
- the ideal customer profile and the signals for recognizing it;
- the key questions for qualification and discovery;
- the exit criteria and minimum information for each stage;
- the most frequent objections and how we handle them;
- the rules on discounts, exceptions and approvals;
- roles and responsibilities at handoffs.
The playbook is written starting from how the best people sell today, founder included. It is often the first time the founder puts in writing things they have done by instinct for years. And it is work that pays off immediately, because it forces you to choose what really works. The playbook is also the starting point for building materials, training and tools for the team, which is what is known as sales enablement.
A practical example: from the founder to a team of three salespeople
Imagine a hypothetical company that develops practice management software for professional firms. It has 15 employees and the founder has personally closed almost every contract. Two salespeople hired in the last year are struggling: they put plenty of opportunities into the pipeline, but few reach signature without the founder stepping in.
A three-month path could look like this. In the first month you analyze the deals won and lost over the last year and interview the founder about how they recognize a good customer and what they ask on a first call. Five stages and their exit criteria come out of it. In the second month you configure the CRM around those stages, write a six-page playbook and decide that the founder steps in only at the decision stage for contracts above a certain threshold. In the third month the salespeople work with the new process, with a weekly pipeline review in which you check the criteria, not the gut feelings.
At the end of the quarter the founder has not disappeared from sales. But they know exactly where they are needed, and their time is no longer eaten up by deals the team can handle alone. When the third salesperson arrives, they will have a process to learn instead of a founder to imitate.
Mistakes to avoid and where to start
Designing a sales process is simple in theory and full of traps in practice. The most frequent ones:
- Copying another company's process. The stages must reflect how your customers buy, not those of a generic model.
- Starting from the tool. Buying a new CRM before deciding on the stages leads to configuring it with the default settings.
- Too many stages and too many fields. A heavy process gets worked around, and the data becomes unreliable again.
- Writing the process without the people who sell. If salespeople do not take part, they will not use it.
- Considering it finished. A process should be reviewed when the offer, the market or the team changes, and in any case at least once a year.
Where to start
The first step is to write down the process as it is today, not as you would like it to be. Take your last ten won deals and your last ten lost deals and reconstruct the actual steps. The real stages will emerge, along with the points where the founder is indispensable and those where they are not at all.
The process is the foundation for then working on pipeline conversion, which I discuss in the article on how to increase B2B sales by improving the pipeline. If you want help designing it, I tackle this within my business process optimization projects, starting from how your team works today. Write to me and let's work out together which stage it makes sense to start from.
FAQ
What is the difference between a sales process and a pipeline?
The sales process defines stages, exit criteria, roles and rules. The pipeline is the set of opportunities that sit in those stages at any given moment.
How many stages should a B2B sales process have?
In a B2B sale of medium complexity, five or six are enough. Each stage must correspond to a real step in the customer's decision and have verifiable exit criteria.
Doesn't a defined process make the team too rigid?
A lightweight process sets the criteria, not the words to say. It leaves salespeople free to decide how to run the deal and removes their uncertainty about when an opportunity can move forward.
Do I need a new CRM to structure the process?
Almost never at the start. First you decide on stages, criteria and minimum information, then you configure the CRM you already use to mirror them. Only if the tool does not allow it does it make sense to consider another one.