Why sales process improvement matters before you buy any technology
Why sales process improvement matters before you buy any technology
There was a time as a sales person, I shared a mobile phone with my partner. It was in the mid-90s at a newspaper group that I got my first business mobile phone.
At the same time, the company had built its own CRM platform but didn’t enforce its use. We were well schooled on what information to gather from our meetings and how to use it, but it was all paper based and stored in A4 notebooks.
The arrival of the internet and email sped things up significantly, but it didn’t make you a better sales person.
Technology speeds up a process. It does not create one and if a sales process is inconsistent then adding an email platform, CRM or a sequencing tool just makes the inconsistency faster and more visible.
A tool applied to a broken process produces bad data at scale, not a fixed process. (Bullshit in, bullshit out quicker.)
I work with a number of businesses, each with their own perspective on technology integration – budget, resource, inherited systems, industry sector, ambition, size & scale all influence the decision making process.
Sales enablement technologies have an obvious role to play in performance improvement, but a good sales process must come first.
What does “Getting the Sales Process Right” actually mean?
For an SME, this comes down to a small number of decisions, agreed and documented:
– A shared definition of each pipeline stage, so two reps looking at the same deal would classify it the same way
– A qualification standard (what has to be true before a lead becomes an opportunity)
– A follow-up cadence for prospects who haven’t responded
– A clear point at which a deal is marked lost, and why
– Who owns the handover — for example, from an MQL to a sales rep, or from field sales to customer success
None of this requires software.
It needs certainty, visibility and consistency.
Enterprise sales teams often have this formalised by a revenue operations function. Most SMEs and individual business owners don’t have that role, so the process either doesn’t get written down or lives in one person’s head — usually the founder’s.
Why Process Has to Come Before Technology
A CRM is only as useful as the data going into it. If the process isn’t defined, reps will use the CRM inconsistently: some will log every call, some won’t; some will update deal stages promptly, some will let them go stale. The result is a pipeline report that looks precise but isn’t reliable, and a forecast that’s guesswork dressed up as data.
Getting the process agreed first means that whatever technology is introduced afterward is reinforcing a way of working that already exists, rather than trying to invent one.
What to look out for once your process is water tight
CRM
A CRM centralises a company’s customer and prospect data, tracking every interaction and deal in one place so nothing depends on one person’s memory or inbox. It’s a game changer for sales management and strategy. For the sales person, it creates order and structure, and streamlines what can often be a complex process. So many options to choose from – HubSpot, Pipedrive or Zoho are all good for SME-scale operations.
HubSpot is great for integrating sales and marketing activities, email sequencing etc…when you use it you wonder how you ever managed before without it. Your sales people can feed all of their activity through the HubSpot platform – including phone calls, which is important when you are coaching your team.
Prospecting
If you are following an account based marketing strategy, Prospecting and data enrichment tools will help keep the top of the pipeline fed, once there’s a defined qualification standard to apply to what comes in. Plenty to choose from here too – Better Contacts, Cognism, Apollo, Surfe and a host of others that become more and more sophisticated and fast thanks to AI.
Make sure that the one you choose has a rich supply of data for your core market – not every platform offers rich data for Northern Ireland / North of Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator occupies an unrivalled space when it comes to social selling.
Conversation intelligence
This one speaks to me as a coach interested in performance improvement. Platforms such as Gong, Brevian or Fireflies help you check whether reps are actually following the agreed process on calls, rather than assuming they are. It helps redefine your sales playbook.
Proposal & E-signature tools
Proposal and e-signature tools such as PandaDoc or DocuSign help remove friction at the point a deal is agreed, show whether a prospect has opened a proposal, and improve sales velocity and closure rates. (I’m still in favour of proposals of a certain value being presented face to face and signed in real time…)
Online meeting platforms
Thanks to COVID, we’re all experts at online chats and presentations – Teams, Zoom seem to dominate this landscape but other providers are available. Face-to-face meetings should be the preferred option, but clearly aren’t always suitable, and there is a skill to presenting well online.
Online Calendars
Simple integration with platforms like Cal.com or Calendly makes securing meetings easier than ever before. Poor qualification will still lead to way too many no-shows.
AI
Where to start with AI? AI, if used properly and carefully, will help with the integration of some or all of the above. It can help with sales emails, brand story content, scheduling, planning, sales script writing…all of it. I have used Claude with a fair bit of success to help tidy up my website, but I am very cautious of where the line needs to be drawn when it comes to authenticity, positioning, messaging, language and tone.
The human-centric stuff that makes interpersonal relationships important in sales.
All of the above have the capacity to help make an already-agreed process faster or more visible.
None of them creates, manages and monitors the process on its own. Yet.
At the bleeding edge of sophisticated big ticket sales teams, other technologies will be at play, but within the confines of your own business, understand what works for you and your team.
Add up all of the above and multiply by the size of your sales team and you might get some resistance from your Head of Finance / Accountant – in truth, it’s going to cost your business whether you opt in or opt out.
Thanks for reading
FAQs
Do small sales teams really need a formal sales process, or is that overkill for a team of two or three?
A formal process matters most at small scale, not least. In a two- or three-person team, there’s no manager checking pipeline data for accuracy, so an undocumented process just means each person is running their own version of it. The problem usually surfaces when a new hire joins and has nothing to learn from except “ask the founder,” or when the founder is out and a deal stalls because no one else knew what the next step was supposed to be.
What’s the first step in fixing a sales process that’s grown organically rather than been designed?
Start by pulling the current pipeline and asking each person to explain, deal by deal, why it’s at the stage it’s at. In most SMEs, this immediately surfaces the real problem: two people will justify the same stage differently, or a stage will mean “we’ve spoken to them” for one rep and “they’ve agreed a price” for another. That gap is what needs fixing before anything else — not the CRM, not the tooling.
Should an SME buy a CRM before or after defining its sales process?
After. A CRM configured around an undefined process just gives everyone a consistent-looking place to enter inconsistent data. The more common failure mode isn’t buying the wrong CRM — it’s buying a good one, populating it for six months, then discovering the pipeline stages don’t map to how the team actually sells, and needing to restructure it with live deals already sitting in it.
How do I know if my sales process needs fixing before I invest in technology?
Three signs are reliable: the pipeline report doesn’t match what you’d get from asking each rep directly what’s live; deals sit in the same stage for weeks with no one flagging it; and forecasts are consistently wrong in the same direction (usually optimistic), because there’s no shared standard for what counts as a genuine opportunity versus a hopeful conversation.
Is conversation intelligence software like Gong worth it for a small team, or is that only for larger sales operations?
It’s worth it at small scale specifically because small teams usually have no one checking how sales conversations actually go. A founder or sales lead can’t sit in on every call, and without some form of review, a documented process only reflects how the team is supposed to sell, not how they actually sell. For a team of two or three, a lower-cost tool like Fireflies or Fathom often covers this without the cost of Gong.
