Developing Sales Stages

A high level and SFDC tactical guide

How many times have you logged into a Salesforce instance to find the following as your #sales stages?

• Prospecting.

• Qualification.

• Needs Analysis.

• Value Proposition.

• Decision Makers.

• Perception Analysis.

• Proposal/Price Quote.

• Negotiation/Review.

Companies believe they are special. So special that Salesforce itself needs to be customized to fit its needs. Sales stages serve as a cornerstone of pipeline management.

Why?

Sales managers should be able to helicopter into any pipeline and be able to assess the following:

• Pipeline size

• Pipeline shape

• Momentum probability

• Areas of coachability

Here’s a sample sales process:

Developing Sales Stages

The buyer’s journey is often talked about publicly. But behind closed doors lurking in each company’s CRM is the seller’s journey. There’s no other place where this is demonstrated more so than its sales stages. Philosophically, customer centricity can better be displayed throughout the relationship built between the sales team and the prospect than the naming conventions of stages.

Sales stages designed well will have key characteristics such as:

• Entry criteria

• Exit criteria

• Stage weighted probability

• Average time

• Next steps

Three Step Sales Process (High Level)

The diagram shows three distinct customer phases:

• Prospecting: prospecting focuses on maximizing effectiveness of generating qualified pipeline from direct sales sources (inbound and outbound). Partners and referrals are excluded to simplify the diagram above.

• Sales Process: the formalized set of steps which the sales team(s) engage with a prospect to successfully sign on as a customer.

• Customer Onboarding: the parallel and sequential processes in which the implementation or professional services teams engage with the new customer to successfully onramp to your product.
  

In the next section I will discuss different sales processes for varying Go To Market models (SMB/transactional vs Enterprise). We’ll also go over a detailed step by step Salesforce technical solution for tracking time in stage.

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Paid members will be able to read the next section. For those that stopped here, next week we’ll focus on developing a sales enablement POV of supporting the sales process. Here is a sample set of sales stages I worked on with a client.

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A word on the Patreon Group

Thanks for reading all the way to this point. If you’re interested in diving deeper and want to get your hands on some real life templates then consider joining the RevOps Rehab Patreon group. We meet on a bi-weekly basis to talk about anything on your mind. Consider joining us today: www.patreon.com/revopsrehab. Full Substack posts are also posted on the Patreon.

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