“I just demo our product. And then I’ll send out a quote with a payment link. A lot of customers will ghost us after that. I can’t quite understand why because a lot of them seemed excited about what we had built.”

I’ll hear this narrative – or some form of it – from founders that have taken the time, brainpower and know-how to build a polished product.

And yet approach building a sales process with a sheer lack of sophistication.

 Over the past decade, hundreds of founders and startup operators have come to me for coaching on their sales and go-to-market challenges. And I’ve done my best to help. In the series unfolding in the coming weeks, we’ll cover the essentials needed for a sturdy sales process, and the factors to consider when you go about designing it. You’ll walk away with the necessary tools to start engineering your process from scratch, and the things to look out for as you take it to market for refinement. So sit tight. Tune in. And, as always, be loud with your questions. Here’s your first installment.

You might be reading the title of this series and wondering, ‘Why the heck does my sales need design and engineering? Isn’t that exclusively the province of my product?’

The answer is a resounding, “No!”

As a matter of fact, if you’re thinking of your startup’s sales that way, you’re missing a large chunk of what you should be considering. Why should you care?

Let me spell it out.

The way you design and engineer your sales process dictates the experience your customer has on their way to buying your product or service. And getting it implemented. The experience they have with you dictates your likelihood of closing them – your close rate – but also sales cycle length, pipeline quality, and average deal size. Sales processes aren’t designed just to increase close rates. They’re designed to make closing deals systematic instead of accidental.

Repeatability is key.

Without it, you can’t even start thinking about hiring reps. And without building out a sales team, all you have is an unpredictable founder-led sales motion. Perhaps a nice lifestyle business. At best.

But nothing close to a venture-scale company. Never mind a unicorn.

That’s why it’s critical to design and engineer your sales process conscientiously. Based on market iterations. Feedback the market is gracious enough to give you.

Before we start diving into the actual build of a process, let’s look at the cardinal sins I’ve observed founders and startup operators make when it comes to their sales conversations. Just being aware of these will help you avoid them altogether. And that should be put ahead of the greater majority of startup founders.

First on the list: sending out blind proposals. ‘What does this actually mean?’, you might think to yourself, if you haven’t encountered the concept before. Well, sending out a blind proposal would have you send a quote to your prospect via email, for example, without taking the time to review the proposal in a meeting with said prospect. Now, why would that be a terrible idea?

In most cases, prospects take a proposal they’ve received, flip to the last page – where the pricing is listed – and make a snap decision on whether or not they can afford it. They might say to themselves, ‘Man, this is far outside our budget. There’s no need for me to talk with Paul anymore.’ I’ll follow up several times over email. And all I’ll get is tumbleweeds. No reply ever again. Nor an understanding as to why the prospect didn’t buy. Which is crucial at the early stages of building sales at a startup. I tell my clients all the time, “I’m not going to hammer you for losing out on deals very early on. But it is a crime not to learn from the L’s we’re taking.”

Now, imagine for a second that instead of sending out the proposal in advance, we had scheduled a call to go over it with our prospect. We can now make sure to defend the value of our proposal. We’re able to detect whether or not that value lands with our prospect. Our floor for this meeting is understanding why our prospect doesn’t buy. Which is critical. Our ceiling for this proposal review meeting includes us getting an opportunity to surface and handle objections. Pull out discounts or other things from our back pockets, if need be. And obtain the verbal close. As you can tell; a much different outcome from getting ghosted without knowing why the person didn’t buy. Thus the importance of always booking a meeting to go over the proposal with your prospect. All the while making sure you don’t send the proposal in advance of that meeting.

Our second sin? Not qualifying properly. Let’s take a quick step back, for the uninitiated. Why do we even qualify in sales? Because our most precious resource as salespeople – and I’d even venture to say as humans – is our time. And we don’t want to waste time on deals that have very little chance of closing in short order. So we qualify for all of the qualification criteria in our ICP. In addition to things like timing/urgency, budget. What happens when you don’t qualify well? You let prospects through and into your sales pipeline that have no business being there. Which has you wasting time chasing deals that shouldn’t be opportunities. And sinks your close rates. As a matter of what, when clients come to me – complaining about their close rates – the first place I look is their qualification process. You want to qualify your prospects as early as possible in your sales process. Preferably in the first meeting you have with them. And make sure you’re not loose with it. Do that, and you’ll save yourself a ton of time and headaches later on.

Our third sales process sin to avoid at all costs? Giving pricing too early. Now, why would that be harmful to us? And our chances of closing? Quite a few people will call salespeople “manipulative” for holding off on giving pricing too early. And it could well be an accurate descriptor. But there’s a legitimate reason why salespeople don’t give pricing too early. At the very beginning of your sales process is when the perceived value of your product in your prospect’s mind is at its lowest. We’re talking about complex products with a high price point, here. Not strawberry lollipops you sell for fifty cents each.

In the very early stages of any sales process, you haven’t had the opportunity to convey much if any value. And you haven’t built any trust. You’re just about to start talking with your prospect directly. Over time, you are there as a salesperson to increase that perceived value in your prospect’s mind. So, if you go about delivering your pricing right off the bat, there’s a great chance your prospect hasn’t fully groked your product’s value. Which will mean they might experience sticker shock and opt out of further interacting with you.

If, on the other hand, you give yourself the time to build up the value in your prospect’s mind through several conversations and also develop trust over that time span – before unveiling your pricing – there’s a much greater chance your prospect thinks to themselves, “Wow, I’m going to make a 12X ROI on this product. I might just have to buy it.” The sticker shock response gets eliminated and you’ve given yourself a much greater shot at the sale. Remember that next time you’re tempted to give pricing early on. Even if your prospect asks for it.

The last two sins I’ll allow myself to group together. Because they’re highly related. Shame is a destructive emotion. One of the worst we can experience as humans. But I’ll often joke with my clients that I’ll allow them to hang their head in shame if they leave a sales meeting without booking the next conversation. It’s Sales 101. Why is that considered crucial?

Without booking the next conversation, you run the risk of having folks fall through the cracks. They might not reply to your followup email and never book another conversation with you. Or that they take a while to respond. And knowing that time kills all deals, other things might pop up and divert their attention away from doing business with you. And you’ll be fighting to find ways to get them back into your sales funnel and onto the tracks towards closing. Including asking yourself a recurring question, ‘What value can I dangle to get them back on a call with me?’ Not an ideal situation to say the least. How much better would it feel to have the next conversation booked in the calendar, properly sold to your prospect as valuable to them with all the required momentum to seal the deal?

Selling the next step – whose omission is our last cardinal sin – enables you to accomplish all of that and make sure your prospect shows up to the next meeting. More on that in a subsequent episode in this series.

Okay, that’s enough for this week. I wanted to make sure you knew why sales process design and engineering was crucial to your success in startup sales, and what pitfalls to avoid. Next week, we’ll start looking at sales process non-negotiables. Items that all B2B sales processes possess in one shape or form. Forget to include any one of them, and your revenue generation is likely to implode. See you for the next installment.