Mark Roberge defines a sales process as a sequence of stages an opportunity passes through that creates common terminology and visibility into pipeline progress. He argues a well-defined, buyer-journey–based sales process (not seller-action based) enables targeted interventions, predictable/scalable revenue, and should be in place before hiring sales reps; HubSpot used this approach during its rapid growth.
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Sales process is basically a sequence of stages that an opportunity goes through as it progresses from a lead to a customer. It essentially establishes a common terminology between business owners, between VPs of sales and managers and reps so that everybody understands where we are in a particular opportunity. The key to having a sales process is it gives you visibility into where we stand as we pursue the revenue targets for the month or the quota. Without having a well defined sales process, you're essentially flying blind. You really don't know how you're doing until that month ends and you tally up where you stand. And what a sales process essentially does is it tells us whether or not we're behind or ahead. And if we are behind, it gives us visibility into where things are currently broken so that we can intervene with some strategies that are customized and personalized to that broken stage. You really want to do it right at the beginning. Me personally, I made the first 500 dials at HubSpot, and I was working on the sales process from day one. You want to have the sales process set up by the time you hire those first salespeople as a blueprint that they can actually follow and work within. Inbound selling is really around transforming sales to align with the modern buyer. One of the key steps to transforming your sales team to be aligned with inbound sales is to build your sales process not by seller action, but base it on the buying journey and the steps that the buyer goes through when they purchase and evaluate your product. If you build a sales process on that, on how the salesperson can help them become aware of these problems opportunities, help them discover potential ways to solve them, help them evaluate the short list of solutions and help them purchase. You're gonna achieve better alignment between your sales team and the buyer through every step of the process. The sales process for HubSpot was instrumental to us having the growth that we've had and becoming that 100, $200 million revenue company every single month. We can see not just how a salesperson did against their quota, we can see how they did through every single stage of the sales process. We can see which of the HubSpot salespeople are doing great at every single stage, and we can investigate that and apply it to all the other salespeople on the team. Trying to scale your business without a sales process is like driving in the dark. You need to establish this common terminology for everyone at the company to revolve around, and that's going to be the key to unleashing scalable, predictable revenue growth for your business.
