What are the phases of a sales process?

Seven, written from the buyer's side: problem acknowledged, budget plausible, requirements written, buying group visible, internal case built, objections surfaced, decision scheduled. Each needs an entry condition that someone outside the deal can verify, otherwise they are only labels.

How many stages should a sales process have?

As many as have ever rejected a deal. A stage that never held anything back filters nothing and only costs data entry. In practice that means three or four for transactional sales and six or seven for complex B2B, and copying a template from the other kind is the most common source of a process nobody follows.

Why does our sales process not get used?

Usually because the entry conditions are not verifiable by anyone except the deal owner, so moving a deal forward costs nothing and nobody objects. Make each condition observable, put the buying group in the CRM as a list of names rather than a checkbox, and the empty lists become visible in a report instead of requiring a confrontation.

What is the difference between a sales process and a sales funnel?

A funnel is a volume model: how many opportunities enter and what share survives each step. A process is a set of rules about when a specific deal may move. The funnel tells you whether you have enough; the process tells you whether what you have is real.

Who belongs in a B2B buying group?

Everyone who can stop the purchase, which is usually more people than the ones who can start it: the user, the budget holder, procurement, IT or data protection where relevant, and often a sceptic with no formal role but real influence. If you cannot name them, the deal is earlier than it looks.

How often should we review the process?

Thirty minutes per quarter with one question: did we move anything past a boundary it did not meet? Definitions decay because a deal sits at a boundary, gets moved anyway, nobody objects, and the boundary has shifted for everyone. Asking out loud is what stops the drift.

Sales Process: Phases, Steps and Handovers

A sales process is the sequence of phases a deal moves through, with an explicit condition for entering each one. That last half of the sentence is what separates a process from a naming convention: if a deal can be in negotiation because it feels like negotiation, you have stage labels, not a process.

The deeper problem is whose process it describes. Most documented processes list what the sales team does, in the order the sales team does it. But B2B purchases are made by groups, not individuals, and those groups have their own sequence with their own veto points. HBR's work on making the consensus sale makes the point that unilateral decision makers have become rare, and the new B2B sales imperative that buyers are mostly stuck on their own internal progress rather than on choosing a supplier.

So the useful version of this exercise is not what do we do next. It is what has to become true on their side before this can move, and the phases below are written that way.

7phases, each with an entry condition

2handovers where most deals actually die

1question per phase: what changed on their side

0stages that may be entered on a feeling

The seven phases, written from the buyer's side

Phase	Entry condition, on their side	The mistake here
1 Problem acknowledged	Someone internally has named the problem out loud	Counting interest as acknowledgement
2 Budget plausible	They can say roughly what it may cost without asking upward	Asking for budget instead of testing whether one exists
3 Requirements written	Requirements exist in a document they wrote, not you	Writing the requirements for them and calling it qualification
4 Buying group visible	You can name everyone with a veto, including finance and IT	Talking to a champion and assuming that is the group
5 Internal case built	Your champion has material they can present without you	Sending a proposal instead of an argument they can reuse
6 Objections surfaced	The quiet sceptic has said their objection in a meeting	Mistaking silence for agreement
7 Decision scheduled	There is a date and a named person who decides	A forecast date invented by sales, not agreed by them

Phase 4 is the one that quietly decides the quarter. A deal with one enthusiastic contact and no visible buying group is not late-stage, it is early-stage with good manners, and it is the single most common source of forecast error.

Why stage definitions decay

Every sales process is precise on the day it is written and vague within two quarters. The mechanism is simple: a deal sits at a stage boundary, someone moves it anyway because the pipeline needs to look healthy, nobody objects, and the boundary has now moved for everyone.

The fix is not more discipline. It is making the condition checkable by someone other than the deal owner. If phase 4 requires naming everyone with a veto, then the CRM field is a list of names, not a checkbox, and an empty list is visible in a report without anyone having to challenge a colleague.

The second decay path is that the process was copied from a template that assumed a different sale. A seven-phase process on a two-week transactional sale is bureaucracy; a three-phase process on an eighteen-month enterprise sale hides everything that matters. HBR's end of solution sales is worth reading precisely because it argues the buying side changed underneath processes that did not.

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The two handovers where deals die

Marketing to sales

Sales to delivery

The handover inside the buying group

Introducing or repairing the process

Reconstruct the last ten closed deals

Won and lost. What actually happened, in the order it happened, on the customer side. This is the raw material; a process designed in a workshop without it describes an imaginary company.

Write entry conditions, not stage names

Each condition must be checkable by someone who was not in the meeting. Customer is interested fails that test; customer sent us their written requirements passes it.

Delete every stage that never rejected a deal

If no deal was ever held back at a stage, the stage is not filtering anything and only costs data entry.

Put the buying group in the CRM as names

A field with a list, not a checkbox. Empty lists then show up in a report, which removes the need for anyone to challenge a colleague in person.

Review the definitions quarterly, in thirty minutes

One question: did we move anything past a boundary it did not meet? The honest answer keeps the process alive; not asking is what kills it.

The process is one of four things that decide whether a sales organisation works; the others are the structure, the numbers you steer by and the incentive. We covered those separately in building a sales team, in sales KPIs and in commission models, and the diagnostic layer above all of them in sales analysis methods. Where the immediate problem is filling the top rather than converting the middle, B2B customer acquisition is the better starting point.

You have a process when

Someone outside the deal can verify each stage
A deal was held back at a boundary in the last quarter
The buying group is in the CRM as names
Forecast dates come from the customer, not from sales

You have stage labels when

Stages are entered because the deal feels advanced
Every deal in the pipeline is in the same two stages
Qualified means something different in marketing and sales
Nobody has changed a stage definition in two years

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The short version

• A process is phases plus an entry condition per phase. Without the conditions you have stage labels.
• Write the conditions from the buying side: what has to become true for them, not what you do next.
• Phase 4, naming everyone with a veto, is where forecast error is manufactured.
• Every condition must be checkable by someone who was not in the meeting.
• Delete any stage that has never held a deal back. It filters nothing and costs data entry.
• Two handovers kill deals: marketing to sales, where qualified means two different things, and sales to delivery, which shows up as churn in month six.
• The third handover is inside the buying group, without you in the room. That is what phase 5 exists to arm.

Sales Process: Map the Buying Side, Not Your Own Steps

The seven phases, written from the buyer's side