Sales Process Best Practices

“Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.” – Hunter S. Thompson

As they scale, many organizations find they don’t have the processes to support rapid growth. Sales process is an area that is critical to get right early. We have worked with hundreds of companies to scale sales processes and frequently see a few basic mistakes. Below are four simple best practices that can help you get started toward a scalable sales model.

1. Classify all leads/contacts/accounts

As your organization scales, you will rapidly add leads and contacts into your CRM. While most CRMs force you to categorize the status of each lead and opportunity (deal), contacts and accounts often don’t have defined statuses. This mistake will quickly compound as you multiply the size of your contact base. While you may not have an active opportunity with a company, it is important to be able to categorize your relationship with every person and company in an effort to target, nurture, and prioritize them. To address this, add a status field to each record type in your CRM and make it a required field.

2. Optimize your CRM

It is important to have a person/team charged with constantly streamlining your CRM to eliminate unnecessary fields and make it as simple as possible for your sales team. See our article on 9 Simple Tactics to Optimize your CRM.

3. Define sales stages

Sales stages are the key to establishing a good workflow. Each sales phase should have a pertinent name and clear definition, and completion of each stage should signify progress. Upon identifying and defining the different stages, document these for your team and ensure that they are programmed into your CRM.

4. Track and manage a few key metrics

With so much data in a CRM, it is tempting to report on every metric. However, to drive sales success, it is critical to define a few key metrics, and then:

• Review both the dashboard and underlying reports weekly


• Confirm your team is entering data correctly


• Review regularly with your team


• Ensure metrics are effective at driving sales performance


• Review metrics/reports as needed to properly incent your team

Never stop improving

Sales processes should not be static but should be constantly reviewed to improve team productivity.

Sales Process Best Practices