How to Build a Sales Process

Sales teams often build from the top down. That’s why they break. I’ve spent decades studying what separates consistent performers from one-hit wonders. It comes down to this pyramid. Start at the foundation. Habits. Three clear priorities every morning. Follow up with purpose, not just to check in. Maintain clean systems. Build momentum through small daily wins. Consistent structure beats motivation every time. Next level up. Skills. Discovery that uncovers real impact. Objections handled early, not late. Negotiation anchored on outcomes. Demos that show value created, not features listed. The best sellers talk less, listen more, and guide with intent. Then comes Mindset. Treat rejection as feedback, not failure. Build confidence through preparation, not personality. Stay curious. Optimize for learning first, outcomes follow. Growth-oriented sellers outperform those chasing quick closes. Now you’re ready for Process. A predictable pipeline rhythm. Templates that move fast but personalize where it matters. Measure what converts. Forecast with evidence, not optimism. Disciplined process closes more deals than instinct alone. Finally, Edge. Build a reputation that precedes the meeting. Share wins and playbooks internally. Run experiments, not guesses. Coach others. Visibility and credibility create warmer referrals and more inbound.

Old school sales tactics are broken. Nobody responds to a hard sell anymore... The best pitches don't feel like sales calls, they feel like a diagnosis. When I first started Lever, I'd get on calls and try to convince people they needed what we offered. It felt forced and no one cared. But everything changed when I stopped trying to convince and started trying to understand. When you do that, the sale becomes natural. Not because you convince them, but because they can see you get their problem better than anyone else. And there are a few things that make that possible: 1. Define A Clear ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) Know exactly who you're selling to. Figure out: → Who this is built for? → What stage they're at? → What they're struggling with? → Who this isn't for? 2. Understand Their Pain Points Show you understand what they're going through. Ask: → "What's your setup now?" → "What's broken?" → "What's that costing you?" → "What changes if this gets solved?" 3. Create An Irresistible Offer Everything flows from your offer. If it's weak, nothing else matters. Make it valuable, clear, and tied to the outcome they want. 4. Build An Ecosystem That Drives Leads Build systems that generate attention, nurture it, and convert it. → Content, outbound, ads → Newsletters, lead magnets, funnels → Calls, product pages 5. Remove Risk With Proof Don't just talk. Show evidence. → Results with context → The process you followed → Predictable timelines Skip the pitch until you've earned trust with proof. 6. Make The Next Step Easy End every conversation with clarity: → "Here's what I'd do next." → "Want me to map this out for you?" No pressure. Just direction. 7. Ask for Referrals Great work leads to referrals naturally. → Deliver a clear win → Remind them who you help → Make it easy to introduce others Sales get easier when you stop trying to convince people and start helping them see what's possible. If you want more breakdowns on building trust and turning conversations into clients, subscribe to our free newsletter, Building Leverage. Each week, we'll give you quick tools to grow your influence and close more deals without feeling pushy. Subscribe here: https://bit.ly/47q7i9v

Sales process improvement isn't just a nice-to-have for SaaS founders—it's the difference between stalled growth and predictable revenue. Here are 5 actionable tips you can implement today: 1. **Map Your Buyer's Path**: Understand every step your prospects take from awareness to purchase. Identify where they drop off and why. 2. **Qualify Leads Early**: Don't waste your team's time chasing unqualified prospects. Build clear criteria and stick to them. 3. **Standardize Your Sales Process**: Create repeatable steps your team follows, but allow room for personalization. Consistency drives reliability. 4. **Use Data to Drive Decisions**: Track conversion rates, time in each funnel stage, and customer feedback. Use this data to refine your approach continuously. 5. **Train for Adaptability**: Encourage your sales team to ask more questions and listen actively. The best salespeople adapt to what the customer really needs—not just what's on the script. For example, a SaaS client of ours was struggling with trial-to-paid conversions. By mapping their funnel and training their team to focus on customer success during trials, they increased conversions by 35% in just 3 months. The key takeaway: Improvement isn't a one-time fix. It's an ongoing practice of learning, adapting, and aligning your process to how your customers buy. Are you improving your sales process with data and customer insights? What's one change you can make today to move the needle?

Building Seamless to 9 figures taught me that most sales advice is theater. The real lessons sound boring. No hacks. No theatrics. Just ruthless execution. Here are the 5 systems most teams ignore (and why they print pipeline): 1.) Fix The Funnel, Not The Close Teams obsess over closing skills when deals die 3 steps earlier. Track where prospects drop off: getting their info, connecting with them, getting replies, booking meetings, them showing up, creating opportunities, winning deals. Fix the weakest step first. If only 2% of your outreach gets replies but 40% of replies turn into meetings, the problem isn't discovery skills - it's your targeting or messaging. Fix the weak link first. Set daily minimums per rep - add 25-50 new verified contacts, make 60-90 calls from your working list. Don't let anyone reach out to unverified contacts. 2.) List Quality Beats Copy Creativity Your best subject line can't save a bad list. But the right list makes average copy work. Teams waste weeks testing subject lines when they're emailing people who aren't buying. Best results come when one of these is true: the buyer is actively looking, changed jobs in the last 90 days, or something just happened you can reference. Track reply rates by list source, not by copy. Signal-based lists outperform cold by 3-5x. 3.) Your Best Rep Is Your Ceiling Stop letting reps wing it and wonder why they underperform. Standardizing your best rep's process does scale. One email sequence, one call script, one objection response per customer type. Lock it for 30 days. In your CRM, reps choose from approved templates - no custom emails (allowing wiggle room for personalization). 90% of touches must follow “the playbook.” Even if it’s not perfect, once you have systems, you can improve them. 4.) Make Intelligence Unavoidable If reps can choose to use buyer data, they won't. Put recent activity, job changes, and verified contact info right in their calling screen. Update it automatically. Block emails if the address isn't verified. Build it into the workflow so they can't skip it. If intelligence is optional, it becomes theater. 5.) Coach The Gap Generic sales training doesn't move numbers. Pick one weak spot per rep - connecting to replies, replies to meetings - and fix it in 7 days using their actual calls. Measure the improvement. Micro-fixes beat workshops. Meet weekly for 45 minutes. Each rep brings 3 specific moments from their calls. Use data to drive the conversation, not war stories. KEY LESSON: When everyone does it differently, you can't diagnose what's failing. Remove the chaos, find the gap, fix it. Most teams have “best practice”s reps *should* follow. Winners have heavily-tested, extremely data-driven systems reps CAN’T skip. That's the gap.

Something cool I realized over the years: you should build process in your company EXACTLY like you build software as an engineer. If you're starting a company or team today and want to build great processes, do what software engineers do, just replace "software" with "process": 1. Start with no process. 2. Make small, frequent updates to your process. Updates should be small but complete. 3. Solve real problems with your updates. - Always start with the most important problems. - Solve bugs and improve quality. - Identify real problems by performing a root cause analysis on events that ACTUALLY happened and that you’re trying to avoid going forward. 4. Push those updates to the machine that executes them. When you make process changes that humans need to follow, always “push it to their 🧠” by notifying them of the process change. 5. Don’t just accumulate processes. Perform “garbage collection”: occasionally reexamine your process and delete what doesn’t serve us anymore. 6. Your process should have one entry point. Every software system has an entry point. Build a central playbook for your team and company and make it the entry point, to ensure that everyone within your team has an entry point into your full process, and doesn't have "blind spots". Going deeper: --- 1. ACTION QUALITY I think about all actions in all processes in 3 categories: 🟢 GUARANTEED: these are actions that are software-controlled, and don't require human discretion. They are executed on 💻 Example: starting 2022, every sandbox sign up at Unit sends a welcome email. 🟡 MOSTLY GUARANTEED: these are actions that happen because we expect people to follow a playbook. We give them feedback and help them develop habits to do it. They are executed on 🧠 Example: in 2021, we had a step within the sales playbook to send a welcome email for every sandbox sign up. 🔴 NOT GUARANTEED: these are actions that are not written in playbooks: implicit expectations, reminders in people’s heads or a message in Slack 2 years ago. They are executed on 🧠 Example: in 2020, I had a reminder in my head to send a welcome email for every sandbox sign up. --- 2. ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS In the Israeli army, there is a saying that "all rules were written in blood". If you instill a culture of root cause analysis in your company, it will AUTOMATICALLY upgrade your process over time: - Upgrade 🔴 not written in a playbook into 🟡 written in a playbook. - Upgrade 🟡 written in a playbook into 🟢 fully automated. Below is how we like to do root cause analysis at Unit.

Years ago, I thought sales success was all about volume. More calls. More emails. More pitches. If we just kept pushing, the deals would follow. Right? Wrong. We were working harder than ever, but the results didn’t reflect that. Then came a meeting I’ll never forget. Mid-pitch, the CEO leaned back and said, “You’re telling me what your product does, but not why I need it.” Ouch. That hit hard—but it was the wake-up call I needed. I realized sales wasn’t about us. It was about them. Their problems. Their needs. Here’s the 5-step strategy that changed everything: Step 1: Focus on Value, Not Volume Stop pushing everything. Tailor your pitch to solve one core problem. Ask yourself: What’s the one thing this client truly needs? Step 2: Shift From Selling to Solving No one likes being sold to, but everyone loves having their problems solved. Follow up with, “How’s [pain point] going?” Step 3: Listen Like It’s Your Job (Because It Is) The best salespeople aren’t the best talkers—they’re the best listeners. In your next meeting, spend more time listening than pitching. Step 4: Understand Your Customer’s Customer Want to stand out? Solve problems for your client’s clients. Position yourself as a partner, not a vendor. Step 5: Don’t Let Tech Replace the Human Touch Automation is great, but empathy and connection win deals. Schedule one personal call or face-to-face meeting this week. Give this a shot and watch how it impacts your results. Because sales isn’t about what you’re selling. It’s about how you’re solving. 🔗 If this resonates with you, check out the link in the comments to join my newsletter. It’s where I share daily sales insights, actionable strategies, and tips to help you close smarter, not harder.

When my client took over as Sales Director at a cybersecurity company two months ago, he walked into a situation many leaders would recognize. An organization built entirely on raw talent with zero process. No phone blocks. No time management. No pipeline visibility. No forecasting capabilities. No documentation. No Salesforce discipline (reps going entire quarters without logging activities). The company had been stagnant for three years. They were consistently missing their targets ($45M annual), tracking toward just $39M this year. Despite having genuinely talented salespeople, they couldn't grow. Why? Because talent without structure has a ceiling. Here's the three step process he implemented to create immediate structure. 1️⃣ Daily Architecture Method I mapped every rep's day hour by hour, creating specific blocks for prospecting, follow ups, and admin work. The goal wasn't micromanagement but rather intentionality. Ensuring high value activities receive adequate time. 2️⃣ Mandatory Pipeline Visibility I established the core principle: if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist. Two reps hadn't entered data for an entire quarter. They were the first to go. Harsh? Perhaps. But you can't improve what you can't measure and if you’re not coachable? You can’t be on the team. 3️⃣ Standardized Sales Process I helped build a repeatable selling system that worked with their unique 3-4 week sales cycle. This included consistent discovery frameworks, value articulation methods, and urgency creation techniques. The results after just 60 days? $7.3 million in new pipeline and, for the first time, the ability to forecast our business with confidence. Most importantly, we've shifted from a "referral and relationship" business model (which is inherently limited) to a proactive, scalable approach. Here’s some truth for you… If your sales organization runs on tribal knowledge and raw talent alone, you're leaving millions on the table. Structure isn't boring. It's the foundation that makes predictable scale possible. — Hey Sales Leaders. Want to build a top 1% sales team? Let’s talk: https://lnkd.in/gfn_qi9E

I broke into sales with no degree, became the #1 BDR in 4 of 16 selling months, and got promoted to AE. Here’s the 90-day plan I wish I had on day one (and the one I used to outpace my ramp class). You’ll sound like you belong in interviews, you’ll hit the ground running, and you won’t hand in the same templated 90-day plan everyone else copies. Step 1: Master the product. Know features → the pains they solve → who feels those pains. Read every case study. Write your own “pain → feature → outcome” crib notes. Step 2: Shadow top performers. Ask for two things: recorded calls and their top five objections (with how they handle each). Copy the patterns, not the personality. Step 3: Learn your buyers. CEOs ≠ CFOs. Map 3 pains, 3 priorities, and 3 success metrics for each persona you’ll call. Use their language, not yours. Step 4: Define a tight ICP. Don’t boil the ocean. List the sub-verticals, headcount bands, tech stack, location, and 2–3 intent signals that correlate with deals in your CRM. Step 5: Build and verify your list. Clean emails. Direct dials. Current titles. I wasted two weeks doing 100–120 dials/day with zero meetings because my list was garbage. Verify before you call. Step 6: Call more than everyone and track everything. Log calls, pickups, conversations, meetings. Know your pickup rate, conversation→meeting rate, and call→meeting rate. Low pickup = data or dialer issue. Low conversion = opener, value prop, or objection handling issue. Pro tip: Get this done in your first week. Use the gaps between onboarding sessions. Ask for manager sign-off on your ICP before you burn time. If you want a live walkthrough check comments

Technical founders, ever feel like you're hitting a wall with sales? You’ve built an amazing product, but getting it in front of the right people feels impossible. The struggle is real. Your hard work should be paying off, but without a sales process, you’re stuck. Take Andrew Goldis at Currents, for example. His business was already doing well, but things really took off when he implemented a structured sales process. Revenue accelerated, his confidence in sales calls soared, and his win rate improved significantly. This isn't just luck. It's the power of a solid sales process. A really easy framework you can start applying to your sales process is FOUNDER. It covers the key components you need to understand about your prospect to really help you navigate deals: Facts: Understand your prospects’ environment quickly. Objectives & Pain: Dive deep into what problems your prospects are trying to solve, and what they're trying to achieve. Uncovering Impact: Highlight the business impact of these problems. Negative Consequences: Connect the pain to the cost of doing nothing. Driving Events: Create urgency with compelling reasons to act now. What happens if the pain isn't solved by a specific date? Reaching a Decision: Uncover how your prospect buys software. Map this framework to a handful of calls you can blueprint (intro/demo, team demo, trial set-up, pricing/contracting, etc). Then schedule the next call at the end of each meeting. Implementing a sales process early can transform your startup. You'll gain clarity, increase your win rates, and most importantly, build a sustainable revenue engine. So, if you're ready to shift your mindset from just building to selling, start today. It's the key to your success as a founder. Want more tips on founder-led sales? Sign up for my free newsletter (link in profile) and get insights directly to your inbox! What's your biggest challenge in building a sales process? Let's discuss in the comments!

I used to think hiring salespeople was the key to scaling. I was wrong After 5 companies and $440M in sales, I've learned the REAL secret: Not more salespeople. Better process.. Here’s how to do it (and 10x your sales results without 10x the team): Most founders dive into hiring, burning cash on reps who underperform. I did this too. At my first company I hired "experienced" salespeople, gave them targets … and watched them fail. I was trying to build a rocketship without understanding physics. Expensive. Frustrating. Pointless. But here's the truth: PROCESS TRUMPS TALENT So, before you hire anyone, become a scientist, and an engineer: ENGINEER V.1 1. Wear all the hats yourself (SDR, AE, Sales Ops) 2. Track EVERYTHING (leads, conversions, time-to-close) 3. Build a repeatable system Only then should you consider hiring. And when you do: SCIENTIST V.1 1. Hire in pairs (A/B test your talent) 2. Train relentlessly (recorded calls, role-play, constant feedback) and test the results 3. Cut fast (60 days max for underperformers) SCIENTIST V.∞ Your sales process should NOT be static. The market changes, your talent changes, your product changes. Always Be Testing. Never, ever stop this. You are the architect of process. No one will ever sell like the founder. But with the right process, you won’t have to. Ignore the "rock star" hype. Focus on the science. (For more, see my free Scale with Science Mini-Masterclass)