Build a repeatable enterprise sales process that clearly defines stages, qualification criteria, and resource allocation—enabling predictable forecasting and rapid new hire ramp-up.
Your Sales Process outlines the steps necessary to take an opportunity to close. In detail, it systematizes your sales teams' methods for prospecting, sales calls, qualifying leads, closing, etc. The sales process is an important living document in which your sales team will accumulate best practices for engaging and converting prospects.
The goal of an enterprise sales process is to create a scalable, repeatable process whereby new team members can onboard quickly and confidently and know how and where to do what. In addition to offering confident onboarding, an effective enterprise sales process aligns sales investment with the customer journey and with the likelihood of closing, thereby reducing risk and increasing return potential.
For instance, if the first step in your process involved an onsite demo with several experts on your team then, regardless of how good you are, you would be wasting money. A first meeting is a low probability customer event (let's say 5% likely to buy). If your onsite demo costs $10K of travel, time and energy, then that customer meeting would cost $200K per closed deal. If, however, your investment of $10K occurred at the
90% likely stage, then the total effective investment would be only $11.1K per closed deal. The degree of effort at each stage needs to be compelling enough to ensure that a likely close, perfect fit customer keeps engaged with the process, but not any more expensive than that.
The impact: In defining a Sales Process, you will establish best practices in the pursuit of a repeatable and scalable sales approach. You create structure and efficiency that empowers your sales team, keeps them accountable, prevents engagement mistakes (that could lose you a client), and allows accurate sales forecasting.
The goal: Create a Sales Process and tailor it to each segment/persona.
How can Golden Section Assist?
A scalable enterprise sales strategy allocates resources to the best opportunities, or the ones most likely to close. Moreover, a well-designed enterprise sales strategy walks a customer through a journey. It neither pulls nor pushes, but instead gently guides.
Successful strategies highlight the problem, define the cost, and then show how your solution can solve it and create value.
You will create a sales process that plans out and documents each step, from lead generation and qualification to win and transition. In general, each stage should be completed with verifiable evidence before progressing to a new stage. This evidence should make the founder and management team comfortable expecting that the customer is truly at that step.
It is helpful to assign probabilities of closing the customer to each stage of the process. Under normal conditions, qualified deals (i.e. after the qualification stage) should close with a 15-25% probability. These probabilities allow your team to understand what a customer is worth at each stage on a probability-weighted basis. This allows you to align your sales and marketing investment against these stages. The investment allocated to each stage should be less than the incremental value of surpassing that stage.
An effective sale requires a lot of moving parts. Building a sales process assumes the following prerequisites:
Once the sales process is created, a best practice to adopt is to host a daily standup within the sales team on any deals in the closing or contracting stages. This ensures deals close to the finish line get the attention necessary to get them across. Often, deals can stall at the end because sales feels like the contract is in the bag.
We recommend establishing a sales meeting rhythm that includes:
In addition to management control systems, the sales organization should be producing the following reports:
During the creation of your sales process, we recommend you empower your team with templates, scripts, and processes. A successful customer journey requires high quality
content, proposals, demos and presentations. Accomplishing this with a team requires leveraging templates, scripts and processes.
From our experience, here are the minimum templates needed:
Scripts are useful to ensure the team is communicating a consistent message. The larger the opportunity the more latitude sales professionals typically have in crafting a message. In these cases, scripts are typically replaced by processes and a form to create a custom script.
Here are a few examples of areas where scripts can be helpful:
A well-designed enterprise sales strategy is essential to the success of any B2B SaaS company. It ensures limited resources are aligned to support the most likely deals. This increases the velocity of revenue and results in better capital efficiency.
In a B2B SaaS seed stage firm there are thousands of things to do each day. It can feel overwhelming. One of the most powerful things a founder and team can do is focus on designing a scalable enterprise sales strategy. It will become a piece of key IP and enable predictability in the business as it grows.
It is helpful to assign probabilities of closing the customer to each stage of the process. e. after the qualification stage) should close with a 15-25% probability.
You will create a sales process that plans out and documents each step, from lead generation and qualification to win and transition. In general, each stage should be completed with verifiable evidence before progressing to a new stage. This evidence should make the founder and management team comfortable expecting that the customer is truly at that step.
The goal of an enterprise sales process is to create a scalable, repeatable process whereby new team members can onboard quickly and confidently and know how and where to do what. In addition to offering confident onboarding, an effective enterprise sales process aligns sales investment with the customer journey and with the likelihood of closing, thereby reducing risk and increasing return potential.
1K per closed deal. The degree of effort at each stage needs to be compelling enough to ensure that a likely close, perfect fit customer keeps engaged with the process, but not any more expensive than that.
Build a repeatable enterprise sales process that clearly defines stages, qualification criteria, and resource allocation—enabling predictable forecasting and rapid new hire ramp-up.