Startup CXO

Chapter 62Scaling Sales Process and Methodology

When you're scaling your sales organization, you should have a very good handle on your sales processes and methodology. It's wise to embrace some type of sales methodology, to have something that enables you to have a framework you work from. You should have a common language around the buyer's journey, and how that aligns with the stages in the pipeline. Otherwise, it's going to be very hard to develop a consistent point of view across the organization about what works and what doesn't work. The sales methodology will help guide the way you question and move the sale along, and the concept of the buyer's journey will enable you to understand how the buyer is looking at you and how that aligns with what must be true for you to come in and out of a pipeline stage.

In the very early stages, when you're selling on whiteboard and you're just trying to get business, developing a sales methodology will be difficult because there are too many unknowns. But as you close in on a few million dollars in sales, when you really need to think about scaling, that's when a methodology is important. You'll be able to ask questions like, why is something getting stuck in evaluation? Or worse, why is something stuck in negotiation when it has sped through the evaluation stage? Clearly you didn't do your homework early on, you didn't think about the methodology and asking the kinds of questions that would have helped you understand the problem, ...