Is Your Sales Process Designed Around the Sale or the Customer?

Most companies with a defined sales process can tell you what their team is supposed to do.

A lead comes in. Someone responds. There's a discovery conversation. A proposal is prepared. Follow-up happens. Ideally, the sale closes.

From an operational standpoint, that makes sense. The process gives the sales team a sequence to follow and helps ensure important steps don't get missed.

There's another side of the process that I think deserves just as much attention.

What is happening for the customer at each of those stages?

The customer isn't moving through your sales process because you've reached the next step. They're trying to make a decision.

Early in the process, they may be trying to determine whether you understand their problem. Later, they may be comparing options, trying to understand the value of what you're recommending, figuring out whether they trust you, or deciding whether the investment makes sense.

If our sales process only defines what we need to do next, it's possible to execute it perfectly without actually helping the customer move any closer to a decision.

1. We sent the follow-up email.
2. We delivered the proposal.
3. We scheduled the next call.
4. We asked for the sale.

All of those things may be appropriate, but completing a sales activity and advancing a buying decision aren't necessarily the same thing.

This is one reason sales processes should be designed from both sides.

At every stage, the business certainly needs to know what the salesperson should do. But the salesperson also needs to understand what the customer needs at that point in the decision.

What question needs to be answered? What concern hasn't been resolved? What information would help them evaluate the options? What might be keeping them from moving forward? What should they understand before we ask them to make the next decision?

That doesn't mean creating an overly complicated sales process or trying to control exactly how every customer buys. Different customers will move differently, and good salespeople need room to respond to the person in front of them.

The process should give them enough structure to understand the purpose of each stage, not simply the activity associated with it. That follows the same principle I use when thinking about operational processes generally: people make better decisions when they understand the intended outcome, not only the procedure they're expected to follow.

If you already have a sales process, there's a simple way to look at it differently. For every stage, write down two things:

• What does our team need to do next?
• What does the customer need next?

If you have a clear answer to the first question but struggle with the second, your process may be better at managing sales activity than supporting customer decisions.

A strong sales process should do both.



The goal isn't simply to move the customer through your sales process. It's to create a process that helps the customer move toward the right decision.