A sales process is the agreed method your company uses to turn a stranger's interest into a signed client: who touches the buyer, in what order, with which tools, and what each person hands to the next. This article answers how to map a written sales process onto the platform: one pipeline per service line, stages named after your steps, and Pipeline Stage Changed workflows that hand the deal to the next role with an assignment. Who owns each part of the sale, where do the handovers sit, and how does the system enforce them? Get it right and a new hire sells the way your best person sells within a month. Get it wrong and every salesperson invents their own method.
Process, steps and methodology are three different things
People use the three words loosely, and the confusion costs months. The process is the whole system: roles, handovers, rules and the records each role keeps. The steps are the sequence a single deal passes through, and on the platform they become pipeline stages. A methodology, such as MEDDIC, is a way of asking questions inside one or two of those steps.
A firm with flat revenue usually has steps written somewhere and no process at all. The steps say discovery comes before proposal. Nothing says who books the discovery call, how fast, or what the marketing team must hand over before sales picks up the lead.
The four handovers that decide whether the process works
Most revenue leaks at the joins, not inside a stage. Write a rule for each of these four joins before you build anything.
- Marketing to sales: what makes an enquiry ready for a salesperson, and how fast that salesperson must respond.
- First contact to the person who runs discovery, if those are different people.
- Sales to whoever prepares the proposal or quote, with the facts they need to write it.
- Sales to delivery once the client signs, so the promises made in the sale reach the people who keep them.
Each rule needs an owner, a time limit and a record. "Sales contacts the lead quickly" is not a rule. "The assigned owner calls within two working hours and logs the outcome on the contact" is.
Before you start
- A sales lead or owner with authority to make the rules stick.
- A list of every role that touches a deal today, including part-time ones such as a partner who signs off pricing.
- Your current steps, even if they only exist as a habit.
- Users in the account for everyone who owns a stage or a handover.
- An hour with each role to ask what they receive, what they need and what is usually missing.
Write it on one page first
Before any build, put the process on one page: roles down the side, steps across the top, a name in each box where that role acts. Add the four handover rules underneath, each with an owner, a time limit and the record that proves it happened. List the facts each handover depends on, such as budget range, decision date and scope notes, because those become required fields later.
One pipeline per service line
If you sell two services with different steps, say a fixed-price audit and a retained engagement, give each its own pipeline. Stages named after the steps of that line make the board readable to the people who work it, and a stage-changed rule can then hand over to the right specialist without guessing which service the deal is for. If two lines share every step, keep one pipeline and use a field to tell them apart.
- Navigate to Opportunities.
- Click Pipelines.
- Click Create New Pipeline.
- Fill in the details, including the name and stages, and click Save.
Name each stage after the step the team already calls it. If the team says "scoping call", the stage is Scoping call, not Discovery. How each stage should be defined and what makes a deal leave it is covered in CRM pipeline stages.
How to automate a handover when a deal changes stage
Each handover in your one-page process becomes one workflow. When a deal enters the stage where the next role takes over, the workflow assigns the contact to that role and tells them. Repeat the pattern for each of the four joins.
- Go to Automation > Workflows and click Create New Workflow.
- Click + Add New Trigger, search for Pipeline Stage Changed and select it.
- Give the trigger a clear name, such as Handover to proposal writer.
- Set the In Pipeline filter to the service line's pipeline and the Pipeline Stage filter to the stage that starts the handover.
- Click Save Trigger.
- Add the Assign to User action and select the users who take over at this stage, keeping split traffic set to equally for an even share.
- Add the Internal Notification action, choose the channel and, under user type, select assigned user.
- Turn on the Publish toggle and click Save.
- Test by moving an opportunity into the stage by hand and checking who was assigned and notified.
The notification must come after the assignment, or it reaches the previous owner. Put the facts the next role needs into the notification text, so the proposal writer receives the scope notes with the alert rather than hunting for them. Backward moves fire the trigger again if the conditions match, which is useful when a deal goes back to scoping and the specialist should hear about it.
What a sales process is for in a 60-person company
At this size, the founder or a few partners no longer close every deal personally. Several people sell, and each one has learned by watching someone else. The process is how the firm keeps its standard while the number of sellers grows.
It replaces the tribal version: the rules that exist only because one senior person enforces them in meetings. When that person is on holiday, the rules go with them. A written process held in the platform keeps running.
It also gives you something to measure. Once every deal follows the same route, you can compare one salesperson against another fairly and see which handover slows the firm down.
Suppose each salesperson closes about four deals a month, and proposals take between two and eleven days to go out, depending on who writes them. A handover rule that the strategist receives scope notes within one day of discovery would remove the main wait. If it capped the slowest proposals at four days, buyers would see a proposal while the discovery call is still fresh.
The time it takes each week
Writing the process takes a sales lead about a day, including the conversations with each role. Building the pipelines and the four handover workflows takes another day. Once live, it takes the sales lead roughly an hour a week to read the handover report and talk to whoever is holding deals up.
The mistake most people make
Writing the process for the ideal deal. Real deals arrive by referral, come back after a year, or need a second decision maker halfway through. If the process has no route for those cases, the team works around it and then stops using it. Write the common exceptions into the one-page version from the start.
The second mistake is never revisiting it. A process written for one service line breaks when you add a second. Review it every quarter with the people who use it.
When not to formalise a process
If one person does all the selling and closes a handful of deals a month, a full process with handover rules is overhead. Write the steps, keep the pipeline, and wait until a second seller joins.
Do not formalise a process you have not yet proven either. If you are launching a new offer, sell the first ten deals by hand, then write down what worked.
Troubleshooting
Leads wait days for a first call. The assignment rule is missing or points to someone who is overloaded. Check the assignment workflow and add more users to the Assign to User action.
The handover workflow did not fire. It fires on real-time moves only, and only when the filters match. Check the In Pipeline and Pipeline Stage filters, and that the workflow is published rather than in draft.
Proposals go out with the wrong scope. The proposal writer is not receiving the discovery facts. Make the scope fields required before a deal can enter the proposal stage, and include them in the notification.
Delivery says they were never told what was sold. The won-stage handover task exists but nobody owns it. Assign it to a named person in delivery, not to a team.
The team ignores the process. Usually the process creates more work than it saves. Remove any record nobody reads and any task that duplicates another.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a written sales process be?
One page for the process and one paragraph per handover rule. If it runs to ten pages, nobody will read it and nobody will follow it. Detail belongs in the stages, fields and tasks, where people meet it as they work.
Who should own the sales process?
One person with authority over everyone who sells, usually the sales lead or a managing partner. Ownership means they change it, enforce it and read the report. A committee owns nothing.
Should the process differ across industries?
The shape stays similar for agencies, consultants, mortgage brokers and real estate firms; the facts each handover needs differ. A broker needs documents and affordability before a recommendation, an agency needs scope and budget. When several people at the client must agree, see the B2B sales process for the buying-group version.
Where does qualification sit in the process?
At the first handover, between enquiry and a salesperson's time. The rules for that are covered in lead qualification, and a structured question set such as the MEDDIC approach can sit inside the discovery step. What happens after each conversation is covered in following up between meetings.