You've lost deals because someone didn't follow up. Leads have disappeared into inboxes. Proposals have gone unchased. You know this happens. The question is: what does a sales system that actually prevents it look like?
When Sales Runs on Memory
Most small businesses don't have a sales system. They have email, calendar, and the founder's memory.
Leads come in through various channels: website form, email, phone, referral, LinkedIn message. Each gets handled differently depending on who receives it and how busy they are. Some get quick responses, others sit for days. There's no consistent place to see what's in play.
Proposals go out and then... silence. Someone meant to follow up but got pulled into delivery work. Two weeks later, the prospect has gone cold or chosen a competitor. The deal wasn't lost on merit; it was lost on neglect.
When sales depends on individual memory and discipline, it works until it doesn't. Someone goes on holiday, gets busy with a project, or leaves the company. The pipeline goes with them.
What a Sales System Should Do
A sales system is the discipline of making sure every enquiry is captured, qualified, followed up, and closed, without relying on memory. It handles the mechanics of selling so your team can focus on the relationship.
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Route every lead to one place Website form, phone call, referral. They all land in the same system, immediately
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Qualify leads so you know what deserves attention Capture the information that tells you whether this is worth pursuing
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Track every opportunity through clear stages Lead, qualified, proposal sent, negotiating, won/lost
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Alert when things go stale Notifications when opportunities haven't moved or haven't been touched
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Remind when follow-up is due Scheduled check-ins that trigger automatically until there's a decision
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Show the pipeline at a glance Total value, stage distribution, what's on track, what needs attention
This isn't about choosing a CRM. It's about building a system that matches how you actually sell. Every business has a different sales cycle, different qualification criteria, and different follow-up rhythm. The system should encode your process, not force you into someone else's.
Sales Pipelines for Different Business Models
Sales processes vary dramatically depending on what you're selling and who you're selling to. A consultancy selling six-month projects operates nothing like an e-commerce business selling products online. The pipeline stages, timelines, and automation all need to match the reality of your sales cycle.
Professional Services Pipeline
For consultancies, agencies, and professional services firms, the sales cycle typically runs four to twelve weeks. The stages reflect the discovery-heavy nature of the sale.
Enquiry
Initial contact made
Discovery
Understanding the problem
Scoping
Defining the work
Proposal
Quote submitted
Negotiation
Terms being finalised
The critical phase here is discovery. Professional services often require multiple conversations before you understand the problem well enough to propose. The system needs to track these conversations, capture requirements, and make sure nothing is forgotten when writing the proposal.
Key metrics for this pipeline: average time from enquiry to proposal (if it's taking three weeks, you might be over-qualifying), proposal-to-close rate (below 30% suggests poor qualification or pricing issues), and average deal value (tracking whether you're moving upmarket or down).
Transactional Sales Pipeline
For businesses selling defined products or packages with clear pricing, the cycle is shorter and the stages reflect this.
Lead
Contact captured
Qualified
Fit confirmed
Quote Sent
Awaiting response
Closed
Won or lost
The emphasis shifts to speed. Response time matters: research from HubSpot consistently shows that responding to web enquiries within five minutes versus thirty minutes increases qualification rates by a factor of four. The system should route leads immediately and track time-to-first-response as a key metric.
Enterprise Sales Pipeline
For complex, high-value sales with multiple stakeholders, the pipeline expands to accommodate procurement processes, security reviews, and legal negotiation.
Lead
Initial interest
Champion
Internal advocate identified
Evaluation
Formal assessment
Proposal
Commercial terms
Procurement
Legal and security
Enterprise deals require tracking multiple contacts within the account: the champion, the economic buyer, the technical evaluator, and the legal team. The system needs to show who's been engaged and who hasn't, and alert when key stakeholders go quiet.
Subscription and Recurring Revenue Pipeline
For SaaS and subscription businesses, the initial sale is just the beginning. The pipeline tracks both acquisition and the early stages of retention.
Trial
Testing the product
Activated
Using core features
Converting
Paid plan selected
Onboarding
Getting to first value
Active
Regular usage
The key metric here is activation: what percentage of trials actually use the product enough to see value? Tracking usage patterns during the trial period lets you intervene with support or guidance before the trial expires.
Lead Capture and Routing
Every enquiry needs to land in one place, immediately, with enough context to act on it. This sounds obvious, but most businesses have leads scattered across email inboxes, phone messages, business cards, LinkedIn DMs, and handwritten notes.
Web forms
Form submissions arrive in the system instantly. No waiting for someone to check an inbox. The lead is created, the salesperson is notified, and the clock starts on response time.
Include hidden fields for source tracking: which page, which campaign, what referring URL.
Phone and email
Phone enquiries get logged with a quick form: name, company, what they need, when to call back. Email enquiries get forwarded to a central address that creates leads automatically.
The goal is minimal friction for the person receiving the enquiry. If logging it takes more than sixty seconds, it won't happen.
Referrals and introductions
Referral leads need to capture the source. Who made the introduction? This matters for thank-you notes, commission tracking, and understanding where your best leads come from.
A simple dropdown or text field for "referred by" makes analysis possible later.
Events and conferences
Business cards get photographed or scanned. The lead includes which event, what was discussed, and what the next step should be. Otherwise, a stack of cards sits on a desk for weeks.
Batch entry after events is realistic. Real-time entry usually isn't.
Lead Assignment
Once a lead is in the system, it needs an owner. Assignment can be automatic (round-robin, geographic, by product interest) or manual (sales manager reviews and distributes). The key is speed: a lead sitting unassigned is a lead going cold.
The system tracks assignment date and first-contact date. If a lead sits uncontacted for more than 24 hours, someone should know about it. In high-velocity sales, that threshold might be one hour.
Response time matters: Research consistently shows that the odds of qualifying a lead drop dramatically after the first hour. Leads contacted within five minutes are 21 times more likely to be qualified than those contacted after 30 minutes. The system should make fast response the default, not the exception. For more data-driven sales insights, see Gong's research on sales conversations.
Opportunity Tracking and Qualification
Not every lead deserves the same attention. Qualification separates the serious opportunities from the tyre-kickers, the good fits from the poor fits. Done well, it focuses your time on deals you can actually win.
Qualification Criteria
Every business has different qualification criteria, but most include some version of budget, authority, need, and timeline. The system should capture these explicitly, not leave them as assumptions in someone's head.
Fit signals
- Company size matches your sweet spot
- Industry you understand and can serve
- Budget range that matches your pricing
- Geographic location (if relevant)
- Technology stack compatibility (if relevant)
Intent signals
- Specific problem described, not vague curiosity
- Active buying process, not "just researching"
- Decision-maker involved, not a researcher
- Timeline stated, not "sometime next year"
- Compelling event driving the purchase
High-fit, high-intent leads go straight to active pursuit. Low-fit leads get polite deflection or a referral to someone more suitable. High-fit, low-intent leads enter a nurture sequence until they're ready. Qualification happens quickly, based on clear criteria, not gut feel. For enterprise sales, frameworks like MEDDIC provide structured approaches to qualification that scale well with deal complexity.
Scoring and Prioritisation
Lead scoring assigns numeric values to qualification criteria, producing a priority ranking. A lead from your ideal industry (10 points), with a stated budget (15 points), and an active project timeline (20 points) scores higher than a vague enquiry from an unfamiliar sector.
Scoring isn't mandatory for every business, but it becomes valuable when you have more leads than you can pursue equally. It forces consistent prioritisation rather than whoever shouts loudest getting attention.
| Lead Profile | Score | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Perfect fit, urgent need | 85-100 | Priority pursuit: immediate response, senior attention |
| Good fit, active project | 60-84 | Standard pursuit: respond same day, work through process |
| Good fit, no urgency | 40-59 | Nurture: add to sequence, check back in three months |
| Poor fit | 0-39 | Disqualify: polite decline, referral if appropriate |
The Discovery Process
Before proposing, you need to understand. Discovery is the process of learning enough about the prospect's situation to propose something relevant. Skip this step and you're guessing.
The system supports discovery by capturing what you learn: requirements, constraints, stakeholders, decision criteria, budget range, timeline, and competitive alternatives they're considering. This information should be explicit and accessible, not buried in email threads.
Requirements capture
What does the prospect actually need? Not what they asked for in the first email (often incomplete or misframed), but what emerged through conversation. Structured fields for must-haves, nice-to-haves, and out-of-scope help organise this.
Stakeholder mapping
Who's involved in the decision? The person you're talking to may not be the buyer. Track the economic buyer, the technical evaluator, the end users, and anyone who can veto. Note their concerns and what they care about.
Decision criteria
How will they decide? Price is rarely the only factor. Technical capability, cultural fit, implementation timeline, references from similar clients: understand what matters to them, not what you assume matters.
Competitive landscape
Who else are they talking to? What alternatives are they considering? This might include doing nothing, building in-house, or hiring a competitor. Knowing the alternatives helps you position appropriately.
The discovery data becomes the foundation for the proposal. When you win, it flows into the project via the client onboarding process. The person doing the work shouldn't have to re-interview the client about basics that were already discussed.
Quote Generation and Proposal Workflows
Proposals take too long to create in most businesses. Someone opens a blank document, copies from the last proposal, updates the client name (hopefully everywhere), rewrites the scope, and assembles pricing. This process takes hours and introduces errors.
Template-Based Proposals
A proper proposal system starts with templates. Standard sections that rarely change (about us, methodology, terms and conditions) are pre-written and maintained centrally. Variable sections (scope, pricing, timeline) pull from structured data captured during discovery.
Standard sections
Company background, team credentials, methodology, terms, payment schedule. Written once, reviewed periodically, consistent across all proposals.
When your terms change, update the template. Every future proposal uses the new version.
Variable sections
Executive summary, scope of work, deliverables, timeline, pricing. These pull from discovery data and get customised for each opportunity.
Structured inputs (not freeform text) make it faster to assemble and easier to analyse later.
Pricing Configuration
For businesses with complex pricing (multiple line items, optional modules, volume discounts), a pricing configurator prevents errors and speeds up quoting. Select the components, adjust quantities, apply discounts, and the system calculates the total.
The configurator also enforces pricing rules. Minimum margins, required approvals for discounts above a threshold, bundling rules. The salesperson can configure the quote within parameters; exceptions require approval.
Approval Workflows
Some quotes need review before going out. Above a certain value, involving non-standard terms, or offering a significant discount: these trigger an approval workflow. The system routes the proposal to the right approver, tracks response time, and logs the decision.
This isn't bureaucracy for its own sake. It's risk management. A quote with a pricing error or impossible timeline is worse than a delayed quote.
Version Control
Proposals evolve. The prospect asks for changes, pricing gets revised, scope expands or contracts. The system maintains version history: what was sent when, what changed between versions, who approved each iteration.
When a deal closes (or doesn't), you can see exactly what was proposed. This matters for delivery (what did we actually promise?) and for learning (why did version 2 win when version 1 didn't?).
Follow-up and Stalled Deals
When a proposal goes out, the work isn't done. Most deals require multiple follow-ups before closing. The system schedules these automatically:
Day 3
Check-in if no response
Day 7
Follow-up call or email
Day 14
Another touch, add value
Day 21
Final check, offer to help
Day 30
Assume lost, request feedback
Each reminder appears in the salesperson's task list until it's acted on. The sequence adapts: if the prospect responds, automated reminders pause. If they ask for more time, follow-up reschedules. The system handles mechanical persistence; you handle the relationship.
When Opportunities Stall
Some deals stop moving. The prospect goes quiet, the internal champion loses momentum, budget gets frozen. The system makes this visible with clear alerts:
Stalled deals need explicit attention: re-engage with new information, reprioritise based on changed circumstances, or close as lost and move on. Leaving zombie opportunities in the pipeline distorts forecasting and wastes attention.
Pipeline hygiene
A healthy pipeline is one where every opportunity has a realistic chance of closing. Quarterly pipeline reviews should challenge stale deals: what's the next step? When did we last make contact? If there's no clear path forward, move it to nurture or close it. A smaller, accurate pipeline is more valuable than a large, fictional one.
Sales Activity Tracking vs Outcome Tracking
Sales teams can measure many things. The question is which metrics actually matter. Activity metrics (calls made, emails sent, meetings booked) tell you what people are doing. Outcome metrics (deals won, revenue closed, conversion rates) tell you what's working.
Activity Metrics
Activity metrics are leading indicators. They're useful for coaching and for diagnosing problems, but they're not the goal.
| Metric | What It Shows | Watch Out For |
|---|---|---|
| Calls made | Effort level, time allocation | Quantity without quality is wasted motion |
| Emails sent | Outreach volume | Easy to inflate, doesn't mean engagement |
| Meetings booked | Conversion from outreach | Meeting with wrong people wastes time |
| Proposals sent | Pipeline being worked | Proposals to unqualified leads lower win rate |
Activity tracking becomes problematic when it becomes the target. Salespeople optimising for call counts make more bad calls. The metric gets hit but outcomes don't improve.
Outcome Metrics
Outcome metrics are lagging indicators. They tell you what happened, not why, but they're what actually matters.
| Metric | What It Shows | How to Use It |
|---|---|---|
| Win rate | Percentage of proposals that close | Below 25%: qualification or positioning problem |
| Average deal value | Revenue per closed deal | Track trends: moving upmarket or down? |
| Sales cycle length | Days from lead to close | Getting longer? Something's stuck |
| Revenue per salesperson | Productivity and efficiency | Wide variance? Best practices aren't shared |
The most useful approach combines both: track activities to diagnose problems, measure outcomes to judge success. When win rate drops, look at activity patterns. When activity is high but outcomes are low, the problem is quality, not effort.
Win/Loss Tracking
When an opportunity closes, the system captures why. This seems minor in the moment but becomes invaluable over time.
Won
What was the deciding factor? Price, relationship, capability, timing, references? Understanding why you win helps you replicate it.
Lost
To whom? On what basis? Price, features, trust, fit, timeline? If you keep losing to the same competitor on the same issue, that's a pattern to address.
No decision
Why didn't they proceed? Budget cut, timing changed, internal politics, project cancelled? No-decision is the most common outcome and often the most preventable.
Capture this data with a quick form at opportunity close: primary reason (dropdown), competitor (if lost to one), and notes. Don't make it onerous; something is better than nothing.
Quarterly Win/Loss Analysis
Once you have a few months of data, patterns emerge. Review win/loss reasons quarterly:
- Are you losing more deals on price than you thought? Maybe pricing needs revisiting, or maybe you're attracting the wrong leads.
- Losing to a specific competitor repeatedly? Study what they're doing differently.
- High no-decision rate? Perhaps you're engaging too early in their process, or your proposals don't create enough urgency.
- Winning on relationship but not capability? That's fine until you're not in the room.
This analysis drives real improvements: adjusting positioning, changing pricing, training on objection handling, or targeting different market segments. Without the data, you're guessing.
Forecasting and Pipeline Health
A healthy pipeline is visible and predictable. When someone asks "what's coming in next quarter?", you should be able to answer with confidence, not hope.
Pipeline Value by Stage
The simplest view: total value at each stage with expected close dates. Weight by probability: proposals sent might close at 50%, verbal commitment at 80%. The weighted total gives a realistic forecast, not a fantasy.
Stage weighting
Assign probability to each stage based on historical data. If 60% of deals at "proposal sent" eventually close, use 60% weighting. Review and adjust these percentages as you learn.
Unweighted pipeline: £500,000. Weighted pipeline: £175,000. The second number is more useful.
Coverage ratio
How much pipeline do you need to hit your target? If you close 25% of proposals, you need 4x target in proposal stage to be confident. The system shows whether you have enough coverage.
Low coverage means you need more leads. High coverage with low close rate means qualification or pricing issues.
Velocity Metrics
How fast does your pipeline move? Velocity metrics reveal bottlenecks and trends.
Average time per stage
How long do deals spend in discovery, proposal, negotiation? If deals sit in "proposal sent" for three weeks on average, that's your constraint. Speed that up and the whole cycle accelerates.
Lead to close time
How long from first contact to signed contract? Track this over time. If it's getting longer, something's changed: market conditions, competitive pressure, or internal inefficiency.
Conversion Rates
What percentage of opportunities move from each stage to the next? Where do you lose the most deals?
| Stage Transition | Healthy Rate | Signal if Low |
|---|---|---|
| Lead to Qualified | 40-60% | Lead quality issue, targeting wrong audience |
| Qualified to Proposal | 60-80% | Discovery not compelling, competition winning earlier |
| Proposal to Close | 25-40% | Pricing, positioning, or proposal quality issue |
Conversion rates by source reveal which marketing channels produce not just leads, but deals. A channel producing lots of leads that never convert is worse than a channel producing fewer, better leads.
Handoff from Sales to Delivery
A won deal isn't the end of the process. It's the start of delivery. The handoff from sales to the delivery team is where context gets lost, promises get forgotten, and clients start to wonder if the company that sold to them is the same one doing the work. This is a specific case of the broader team handover challenge.
What Needs to Transfer
Everything captured during sales should flow to the people doing the work:
Scope and requirements
What was promised? The proposal scope, any amendments, verbal agreements, things explicitly excluded. The delivery team should know exactly what's in scope without re-asking the client.
Key contacts
Who's who at the client? The project sponsor, the day-to-day contact, the technical lead, anyone else relevant. Include notes on communication preferences and sensitivities.
Context and history
Why did they buy? What problem are they solving? What was their previous situation? This context helps the delivery team understand the real objective, not just the tasks.
Risks and expectations
Any concerns raised during sales? Expectations about communication frequency, milestone reviews, or specific deliverables? Things promised that weren't in the formal proposal?
The Handoff Meeting
For significant projects, a formal handoff meeting between sales and delivery ensures nothing gets lost. Walk through the deal summary, introduce the delivery team to key context, answer questions. This takes thirty minutes and prevents weeks of confusion.
The system supports this with a handoff checklist and a deal summary that pulls together all the relevant information in one view. The salesperson confirms handoff complete; the delivery lead confirms they have what they need.
The client's experience: A smooth handoff feels professional. The delivery team knows their name, understands their situation, and doesn't ask them to repeat everything they told the salesperson. This builds confidence that they made the right choice.
How It Connects
A sales system doesn't exist in isolation. It connects to the systems that come before and after:
Data flows through. The information gathered during sales is available when work begins. No one re-enters details. No context is lost. The client doesn't have to repeat themselves.
The Difference It Makes
A proper sales system changes the texture of selling:
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Leads don't disappear Every enquiry is captured, assigned, and tracked until there's a decision
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Follow-up happens Systematic reminders prevent proposals going cold because someone got busy
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Pipeline is visible You know what's coming without asking around or piecing together spreadsheets
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Qualification is consistent Time goes to the right opportunities, not whoever shouted loudest
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Proposals are faster Templates and configuration mean quotes in minutes, not hours
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Patterns emerge Win/loss data reveals what's working and what isn't, so you can improve
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Forecasting is realistic Pipeline data with historical conversion rates makes predictions meaningful
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Handoffs work Won deals transition to delivery with full context, no dropped balls
The team stops losing deals through forgetting and starts closing deals through consistent execution. Sales becomes a process, not a personality. The business can grow without the founder doing all the selling.
Build Your Sales System
We build sales systems that match how your business actually sells. Your pipeline stages, your qualification criteria, your follow-up rhythm, your proposal templates. The system encodes your process so it happens consistently, whether you're managing five opportunities or fifty.
Let's talk about your sales process →