Most sales processes are a pile of steps nobody ever cut. A short exercise cuts them.
List every step
Take 3 to 5 recently closed deals, won and lost, so you map what happened rather than what the playbook says. Block about 90 minutes with the sales leader, one top rep, one newer rep and whoever owns the CRM. List every action the team and the buyer take in a typical deal. Be exhaustive. You will cut later.
Three filters
A step survives only if it passes all three.
- Required. Should this happen in every sale, even when a rep could skip it? If it is optional or situational, it is a tactic, not a stage.
- Factual. Is it tied to an observable action, not a feeling? “Buyer attends demo” passes. “Buyer loves demo” fails, so rewrite it.
- Inspectable. Can a manager verify it from a record in the CRM? If it is not logged, it did not happen. Name the record or the field.
What gets cut
Here is an illustration. A fictional team listed 24 steps and cut or merged 17. The numbers are made up to show the method, and they are not a benchmark. A sample of the decisions:
- “Research prospect on LinkedIn” is not required. It is a good habit, so coach it. Do not make it a stage.
- “Prospect seems engaged on call” is not factual. Rewritten as “Books discovery meeting.”
- “Rep updates forecast” is not a buyer-facing step. It belongs in the weekly inspection.
- “Manager approves discount” is situational. It is an approval workflow, not a stage.
- “Buyer signs contract” passes all three. Kept as the closed-won exit.
Most of the cuts fall into three kinds: good habits to coach, situational steps to handle with approvals or playbooks, and feelings to rewrite into a buyer action.
A rule of thumb
This one is mine, not a measured result: if more than half of your list survives the filters, you probably have not been strict enough.
The catch
A short process is not automatically a good one. The filters remove steps that cannot be checked. They do not tell you whether the steps that remain are the right ones. For that, pair each stage with a buyer action, as in Name your stages for what the buyer did.
The Sales Process Blueprint has the worksheet, the filters scored in an Excel companion, and the stress test. If you want the lighter version, the free stage definition one-pager (opens in a new tab) is a good place to start.
I’m Seth Levanen. I find the AI shortcuts that keep the quality and drop the busywork. Email me if you want to talk about it.