How to Design A Sales Process to 3x ARR in 11 Months

so the first question that I have for you here today is how many of you have a sales team okay perfect uh how many of you are founders who do the sales yourself okay perfect some doubling there good both both okay perfect perfect now raise your hand if uh you have a documented sales process okay now keep your hands up for me you two are you confident that if you hire a sales rep they can follow the process and they'll be able to hit their

number keep your hand up if that's true okay cool uh that is the goal the goal is to have a sales process that you're so confident about that you can hire a sales rep they follow the process and then they hit their number and ideally you're can hire the average sales rep they're able to do that and then you just don't hire average salesp people you hire the best possible sales people you can right and that's what I want to talk about today what I find is one of the biggest levers to pull is the sales process that your team is executing on

and we have to be very diligent about that a lot of Founders what they do is they do what I call hire and hope let me know if you've ever done this before you hire a sales rev you cross your fingers and you hope that they work out and then it doesn't and we wonder why well often it's the process that they're following so here's what we're going to cover over the next uh 20 minutes I'm going to talk about the three qualities of a sales process I'm going to share with you how to actually create one so you have a documented process that people are following and then I'm also going to

walk through quickly how to make it repeatable my objective today if I succeed is you can walk away from our conversation and have a clear plan of what to do to really get some refinement around your sales process so you can get to repeatability that's ultimately the goal does that sound fair yep okay cool well let's jump uh right in here I know this works because I've built over 70 B2B sales teams I've done this a lot I've been in SDR cold calling that's how I started my career I

was an accountant excutive I ran sales teams I've been in at Venture back companies in board meetings when sales aren't going well I've been in board meetings where things are going fantastic so I have a a lens here that I see the sales function through and for a long time that lens was the people the training and I was very focused on the people and the training and what I found over the years is that that's a nice lever to pull but if the structure of the sales process the operation of the

sales team isn't where it needs to be it Bec very difficult to make any kind of progress so that's how my career shifted over time where I became a lot more operational a lot more higher level to build repeatable sales processes and I wanted to use this example as one to illustrate what the journey looks like this is an organization that went from 400k in ARR to 1.2 million in 11 months this company specifically is venture-backed and one of the things I want to

highlight is the early stage the founder just doing the sales the process that you develop as as a Founder is very different than the process that you're going to want your sales people to follow so in this case here the founder had built this sales process it was little all over the place and had a bunch of things in there to help prioritize the deals that were more likely to close because you have multiple things on your plate if you're a Founder right so the process wasn't great but it was working he had a great inbound uh engine so you hire two AES that's what we did here two account executive came in and one of the hacks

is you hire somebody with experience in the industry speaking the language is so important especially early on and they were immediately able to find some success so they doubled the sales that the founder was doing just in the second month of them being there working inbound leads and really squeezing a lot more juice out of the orange than the founder was the founder had a lot of things on play like I said earlier this allows you to start refining the process and one thing you'll hear me say often is you don't hire salese to get out of sales you hire sales people to get

deeper into it it's really important to realize that because this is where a lot of Founders make mistakes they hope the sales person is going to be able to do the heavy lifting it's not the case so you double down here two sales reps start you start refining the sales process and once you get some confidence and what we did here this is about the time where things start flattening out hired another two sales reps so now there's four sales reps total what ends up happening if you're an inbound only function you need marketing to scale with sales we have more people we need

more leads that didn't quite happen as ites often doesn't and what ends up happening is you have a sales team Revenue wise closing new AR that's doing fairly well but the problem is the individuals on the team aren't doing all that great so you're not really hitting your quota but if you compare it to what you're doing before you're on the right track you know it's a lead problem so we have a process that someone's executing on we have multiple people executing on we're confident about that we just need more leads so about right here is when

we bring in sdrs to do cold Outreach so now we go from inbound only to inbound and outbound and that completely explodes the pipeline because it's fast and cold outbound is guaranteed to work it works every time if you talk to your potential customers you end up getting more sales it's kind of shocking how that works out so this is the journey and it's an iterative one and that's what I'm going to walk you through today and I want to start off by sharing with you some of the components of an effective sales process especially if you're trying to get to repeatability

which I think everyone in this room is the first one here is it must be objective one of the more common problems that I see with early sales organizations is they might have two sales reps but they those sales reps have different definitions for different parts of the sales process so an example of this would be let's say you have a qualification deal stage and a demo deal stage one sales rep will do a qualification call book a demo and then move it to the next stage that makes sense the other sales rep will do a

qualification call agree to do a demo decide to schedule it over email but still move the stage over and anybody who has had this experience before knows it makes it very difficult to analyze your sales process when we have two different definitions so the first thing that's incredibly important is that it's objective we all agree on it and we hold the sales reps accountable to the definitions of each stage the next is it's got to be flexible so raise your hand here if you maybe sell larger companies and each sales process is a little bit different okay some of you

great well you can't just do a whole different sales process every single time you need a sales process that's flexible to how the buyers Buy because if you do something different every single time it becomes very challenging to measure and figure out what works and what doesn't okay you end up real deep in the weeds trying to figure things out so you need something a bit flexible and I'm going to show you how to do that here and then finally like I've said a few times it needs to be measurable you have to measure every part of the sales process from generating appointments all

the way to closing deals so that you can identify the bottlenecks holding the team back from hitting their numbers and then you double down on fixing those bottom necks that's essentially what we're going to be doing so let's go into section two here I'm going to walk you through how to design your sales process it's a tool that I have called the sales process designer and one of the critical things here is that we have a visual representation of our sales process I'm going to share with you why that's important in a second um also I have a

pdf version of this uh if you either ask me out there or if you message me on Instagram I'll send it to you but okay let's talk about the different stages here so right here we have qualification Discovery evaluating negotiating I'm going to go through an Enterprise example because it's very filled out also every sales process looks very different so yours might shape up to be very different than this one this is just an example but the first thing you need to do is understand what stages are happening in your sale now everyone here feels like I have deal stages in my CRM

what's the big deal and I want to share with you a couple mistakes that generally happen either we don't have enough deal stages so a lot of things happen in one stage you can kind of tell that this is um this is the case when the time in stage is really long for one of your deal stages so maybe you have qualification demo and then close deal and then deals are in the demo stage for three months doesn't make any sense there's stuff happening there right so then you that's an indicator that you might need to split the stages up the

other mistake I see is the other way and a lot of mid-market if you sell to the midm market you sell to the Enterprise is where I see this the most is you have like 10 15 deal stages is total Madness and you know that that's a problem because sales reps will skip deal stages that's a problem we do not want deal stages being skipped so you need to think through the stages of your sales process sure different meetings might take place in those stages and we're talk we'll talk about that next but you have to have at a high level some awareness of What stages people are

going through from first hearing of you to actually closing and signing a contract so next are the meetings what meetings take place and here's where flexibility comes in not all of these meetings will be mandatory they don't have to be mandatory but we need to know if they exist or not and that's one of the things that I see the most often when I look at a very long sales pipeline where we're skipping a lot of deal stages is there are certain things that not every company has to do and we skip around

between between stages it gets very confusing so I point this out because having all your meetings listed out and visual is helpful for a couple of reasons one like as you can see here you know qualification stage we do a qualification call Discovery we're doing Discovery calls we might do technical scoping maybe that's optional we're doing a demo in this stage maybe or maybe you need to do technical scoping you need a different stage for demo because that's a bigger part of your process maybe in evaluating you're

reviewing a solution design right this is for an Enterprise sale maybe you're doing workshops Mutual action plans maybe do Mutual action plans earlier you map the whole thing out and then visually so if I come over here and I look with you you can see where's the heaviest part of our sales process this is beneficial because if you have a couple of sales rep reps and you have one where most of their deals are in qualification and then you have another sales rep where most of their deals is in Discovery or evaluating who do you think is

busier the person who has more deals in the middle of the sales process now for some people it's heavier weighted on the front end for other folks it's heavier weighted on the back end sometimes it's a nice little bell curve so everyone's going to look a little different but it's important to have that awareness which leads me to the final thing here which is exit criteria this part is really important to get right with your salese we need to be following a well-defined objective like I talked about earlier uh sales exit

criteria or deal stage exit criteria so in this example here qualification call conducted demo scheduled on the calendar everyone should write this down if there's not a next step on the calendar the deal doesn't exist it doesn't and to have sales rep say oh I'm in the process of booking it is the first red flag that a deal might fall through doesn't mean they always do but you have to hold the sales reps accountable to getting that next step now exit criteria pretty simple

there but now what about in the cases where we have optional deal optional meetings that take place well was the option needed if so then it's a requirement to move to the next stage and it's on the salese to make sure that they are mapping out what the sales process look like how do you guys typically buy Solutions like this right if you have multiple stages in your sales process you need to have a clear understanding of the buying process the person you're selling to so that's more of an Enterprise specific one but I think you get the idea and then you'll

notice again next step scheduled it's not on the calendar it doesn't exist very important and also as people who lead sales teams you know whether you're the founder leading it or if there's a VP of sales this year how long are you going to let deals stay in the pipeline before you close lost them oh I'm still trying they haven't responded yet oh they told me that they're talking internally and we're going to schedule the thing after you know after they talk internally how long are you going to allow that to happen how many of you let's be honest raise your hand if you feel like you

have way too many deals in your pipeline that are real that aren't real yeah we all do they kind of get clogged up there and it makes forecasting near impossible it also makes sales reps feel like they're doing a lot when they're not and nobody has real visibility no being honest and it's not malicious right sales people want to close Deals they want to hold on they're optimistic but from a leadership perspective it makes it very difficult to build a sales process that you can rely on so we need to have clear exit criteria so here are a couple examples I'll let you take a picture of this these are in these are

just examples of uh different selling motions so SNB selling into the Enterprise selling into the mid-market so I'll let you take a picture of this this might be what it looks like for you what I recommend doing is sitting down and filling all of this out so that way you have a clear picture of what your sales process looks like all right couple of takeaways so far and then I want to jump into how do you make this repeatable so first is you decide on what deal stages match your buyer your buying process or your buyer process and any optional ones that you need you put

in there organize all of the meetings into each of those stages Define the criteria to move from one stage to the next and then the last one is hold your sales team accountable to it and this is where everybody drops the ball a process is only good as as how well you can hold the team accountable to following it all right section three here is really about making the sales process repeatable and this is a part that if you just do this over and over and over and over again it is impossible not to have a sales process at the end of it that's

repeatable and you can rely on the first thing here is you're going to track all activities so things like dials these are before the deal happens I want to track all calls being made all emails being sent if you use LinkedIn as part of your prospecting we're tracking all the activities what are we doing here's another thing to write down the greatest predictor of future pipeline are today's activities it's just the reality you have to track them engaged how many people answered the phone how many people replied to an email replied to a

LinkedIn message we need to understand those metrics how many meetings get booked more importantly what channel booked the meeting how many of you here know when you look at meetings that your team booked if it came from a cold call cold email or LinkedIn raise your hand if you know okay one person maybe one and a half it's important that you understand which channel is driving the results the amount of times I I see a company doing a whole bunch of email Outreach yet all of the medas get booked by cold calling is pretty gross because

emailing so easy but then what's moving the needle it's the cold call sometimes it's flipped right so you need to figure that out for yourself if you're not tracking you'll never know completes the meetings that get booked how many of them actually show up and happen and of the ones that happened how many qualified this is now giving you a sense of where could our bottleneck be is it dials to engaged hey people just aren't answering the phone is it engaged to meetings we're just not booking meetings when we talk to our buyers that's a problem right is it no one's showing up

for the meetings is it that people show up but they're not qualified it helps us understand where the bottleneck is and then from there you want to analyze all the available information so we talked about those uh data points before why don't we talk about this what's the drop off between each stage so when you've mapped out your sales process you need to understand where's our drop off are 60% of our deals dropping off after the the qualific or the discovery stage if 60% of our deals are dropping off we need to ask why we need to create a

hypothesis on how we can improve it and then we take action on the data that we have we form the hypothesis we take the action we measure the impact and we repeat this if you do this alone identify a bottleneck roll out a solution and repeat that over and over and over again you will get to a repeatable process but you have to follow that procedure and the the very beginning of it is having a process that they're following in the first place which is why we've talked about it so in

the last 20 minutes uh we talked about the three qualities of a sales process how to create a sales process and how to make it repeatable so if everybody could stand up real quick so I can close out that'd be great everybody stand up real fast everybody here has what you need to build a repeatable sales process I talked to a lot of Founders at the earlier stage and can feel a bit overwhelming ah how do I get my salese to do the same thing every time oh are they the right person are they not are our leads bad am I a bad leader like all

these questions that constantly come up but if you take a more data driven approach and you're thoughtful about your execution it is not that challenging you have the tools to do it you have to be thoughtful about how you go about it so I hope you guys can take away from this what I just gave you go back really organize your sales process but I'd like to give you one more thing here if everyone could take out their phone and open your camera what I put together here is a whole bunch of free resources for you so

go ahead and scan this the first is a sales metrics training so that way you guys have some guidance on how to analyze sales metrics the next is the sales team Money Ball bundle this is a collection of resources become very data driven with your sales team AE fundamentals course is like a 41 course um a 41 lesson course on how to sell for your salese you can give them that the golden call script is the cold call script that I've developed by analyzing over 3.9 million cold calls and then cold the committed is my first book that I wrote on how to do cold Outreach so

this is all for you guys if you ever have any questions never hesitate to reach out thank you so much for your time and we'll talk soon