Intensive workshop · Transformation
What had to happen to move it forward
Stages defined by something the buyer did, not by what the seller is hoping for.
- Duration
- 4 hours 30 min
- Delivery
- On site · Virtual
- Participants
- From 6 to 18 participants
- Investment
- Request a quote
Investment depends on scope, number of participants and delivery mode. We prepare a proposal at no obligation.
The problem it solves
Most small companies have a sales process. What they do not have is a written version of it. It lives in the head of whoever sells, works reasonably well while that person is there, and cannot be reviewed, taught or corrected.
Without defined stages, the pipeline conversation becomes a survey of moods. That one is hot. That one closes this month. That one is ready to sign. None of those sentences can be checked against anything, which is why the forecast is found out on the last day of the month, when there is no time left to react.
The forecast is not the worst of it. The worst is that nobody can say where in the process the business is lost, because there are no parts. A company that does not know where it loses can only try to sell more, which is the most expensive answer to almost any commercial problem.
What it covers
The session builds the process out of the company's own deals rather than a funnel template. It starts with recent wins and recent losses, reconstructs what actually happened in each, and derives from that material the stages this company really has, which rarely match the ones printed in any manual.
The core of the work is the exit criterion for each stage: what the buyer, not the seller, had to do before the deal can be treated as advanced. A meeting the buyer scheduled. A document the buyer asked for. A new person the buyer brought into the conversation. Verifiable acts, not interpreted signals.
The last part defines the record: which fields get filled, at what moment, and what has to be written down so somebody else can pick the deal up without calling whoever was working it. It also decides what is deliberately not recorded, because a process that asks for too much is abandoned during the first busy week.
What participants learn
- Reconstruct the sales process the company already follows, from real wins and losses.
- Define stages whose exit criteria are verifiable acts of the buyer.
- Separate a stalled deal from a lost one with a written rule.
- Decide what gets recorded at each stage and what is deliberately left out.
- Read the pipeline by stage to see where deals are lost, not only how many.
Agenda
- The process that already exists without being written
- Reconstructing recent wins and recent losses
- Your own stages versus the stages in the manual
- Exit criteria: what the buyer did in order to advance
- Qualification: when to stop working a deal
- Stalled and lost: the rule that separates them
- What gets recorded, when, and for whom
- Reading the pipeline by stage: where it goes wrong
What the organisation leaves with
- A written sales process with named stages and an exit criterion for each.
- A qualification rule and a close-as-lost rule, both applicable without debate.
- A record format per stage, with the minimum fields and the moment they get filled.
- A pipeline review with a fixed agenda and defined questions per stage.
Programme details
- Format
- Intensive workshop
- Also available as
- Workshop · Corporate training day
- Languages
- Español · English
- Includes
- Participant workbook
- Action plan
- Post-training resources
- Facilitation
- ALUD Consulting LLC — Global Business Transformation.
Who it is for
- Owners who sell personally and want to stop being the only one who knows how.
- Sales managers with a small team and a forecast nobody trusts.
- Companies about to hire their first salesperson with nothing to hand them.
- Operations leads who receive what was sold and find out late what was promised.
Frequently asked questions
- Do we need a CRM first?
- Not for the workshop, and it is better not to have configured one yet. Setting up a tool before defining the stages usually produces a system that mirrors the software vendor's funnel instead of the company's.
- Does it work for long technical sales that go through bidding?
- Yes, and the exit criterion matters more there, because the cycle is long and optimism has months to accumulate. What changes is the number of stages, not the method.
- Can the manager attend alone and roll it out to the team afterwards?
- They can, at a real cost. Exit criteria have to be argued with the people who talk to buyers; defined without them, they get applied as paperwork and the records get filled to comply rather than to decide.
Request this programme
Tell us the context and we will prepare a proposal tailored to your organisation. No obligation.
Working this inside the organisation
If this challenge will not be settled in one session, ALUD Consulting LLC works it as consulting: management consulting, human resources, strategy, organisational design, leadership development and business transformation.