Build a sales process around how your customers buy.
This is the most critical step of your sales playbook. It’s where everything comes together: your Ideal Customer Profile, your understanding of the buyer’s journey, and the insights you’ve gained into one structured sales process.
Your sales process needs to be measurable, repeatable, and scalable. And without a proper Sales CRM, this is almost impossible to do well.
Here’s what often goes wrong:
Most sales teams don’t realise the importance of mapping their sales process to how their customers actually buy. So, when they set up their CRM, they either:
- Use the default pipeline that came with the software
- Or pick a random sales pipeline template they found online
Both are bad practices.
Why? Because those pipelines were not designed for your buyers. They weren’t built based on your sales cycle, your customer priorities, or your product.
Sales is about guiding the buyer to a solution that solves a priority problem. The only way to do that effectively is by building a process that mirrors how your customers move from problem to solution.
Here’s how you can start building your sales process mapped to your customer’s journey:
Name your pipeline stages: These are the key stages that represent how your buyer moves through their decision-making process, and how your sales team supports that journey. E.g.:
- Qualify – Is this the right kind of customer for us?
- Discovery – What do they need and why?
- Proposal – Can we solve the problem, and what does that solution look like?
- Negotiation – Are we aligned on terms and ready to close?
- Won – Customer has signed and is ready for onboarding
- Lost – Deal didn’t move forward
Set close probability: Assign a percentage probability to each stage. This helps your team forecast revenue and know which deals are most likely to close. E.g.:
- Qualify – 10%
- Discovery – 30%
- Proposal – 50%
- Negotiation – 75%
- Won – 100%
- Lost – 0%
Set goals for each stage: Each stage should have a clear goal for what you're trying to achieve in collaboration with the buyer. E.g.. (Proposal Stage):
- Align on the proposed solution
- Finalise commercial terms
- Ensure the buyer understands implementation scope
Set exit criteria: This is what the buyer must do before the deal moves forward. Exit criteria must be observable, buyer-driven actions, not internal assumptions. E.g. (Discovery Stage):
- Buyer attends discovery call
- Buyer confirms pain points and shares context
- Buyer agrees to proceed with next steps
Define Sales Rep Activity: These are the core actions the salesperson must take to guide the buyer through that stage. E.g. (Qualify Stage):
- Conduct initial qualification call
- Send follow-up email summarising notes
- Log qualification info into CRM
Define Results: This is the result of the sales rep’s effort in the stage. It’s what shows that progress has been made, even if the stage hasn’t yet changed. E.g. (Negotiation Stage):
- Contract has been sent and reviewed by buyer
- Buyer confirms any changes or sends to legal
- Verbal commitment to close is given
By structuring your sales process in this way, you create a system that mirrors how your customers actually make decisions, making it easier to guide deals forward, spot what’s working, and forecast with confidence.
Customise your Sales CRM to organise your sales process.
The best way to ensure repeatable, scalable, and predictable sales performance is to embed your sales process into your CRM.
Once you’ve built a process that mirrors how your customers buy, it can’t just live in a document or your team’s head. It needs to be operationalised and structured clearly inside your sales CRM.
Too often, sales teams use default CRM setups, generic pipelines, or random fields that don’t reflect their actual customer journey. This creates noise instead of clarity, and makes it hard to manage deals, coach reps, or forecast revenue.
By customising your CRM to match your sales process, you give your team a single system that:
- Guides reps through the right steps at the right time
- Tracks meaningful buyer actions at each stage
- Surfaces what’s working and what’s not
- Enables confident forecasting and decision-making
From pipeline stages, to close probabilities, to custom fields that capture key data, your CRM becomes the engine of your sales execution.
If you want a system your team can trust, you need to build it around the way your buyers actually move.