Notes for owners · Sales management
How to create a sales process for a small business
A sales process is the stages a real order already passes through, each with what must be true before a deal can leave it, reviewed weekly.
The GullySales team · Updated 15 Sept 2026 · 6 min read
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A sales process is a written description of the stages a real order passes through in your business, with a clear statement of what must be true before a deal moves to the next stage. You build it by examining orders you have already won rather than by copying a template. For most small businesses five or six stages covers everything, and the benefit appears within a month: the owner can see where deals are stuck, and two salespeople stop giving two different answers to the same buyer.
Why an undefined process costs money quietly
With no stages, everything in the pipeline looks the same. A buyer who asked for a price on WhatsApp and a buyer who has approved the drawing and is waiting for a purchase order both sit in the same list called "follow-up". The owner cannot tell whether this month's revenue is safe, so the forecast is a feeling.
The second cost is inconsistency. Each salesperson invents their own sequence, so the discount given, the questions asked and the documents sent depend on who picked up the phone. New joiners take six months to become useful because there is nothing to learn from except watching.
The third cost is the leak. Without exit criteria, quotations go out to people who were never going to buy, and real buyers go quiet because nobody defined what happens after a site visit.
Build the stages from your own won orders
Take your last ten or fifteen orders and write out what actually happened, in order, for each. Enquiry arrived here. This person called. This document went out. This meeting happened. This objection came up. This is what won the order.
Patterns appear quickly. You will usually find that the wins share two or three steps the losses skipped: a site visit before the quotation, a conversation with the technical person and not only with purchase, a sample approved, a named decision maker met in person.
Those shared steps become your stages. Everything else is noise you can leave out of the first version.
A workable default, with exit criteria
| Stage | What it means | Cannot leave until |
|---|---|---|
| Enquiry | Somebody has made contact | You have spoken to a person and know what they want |
| Qualified | This is a buyer you can serve | Need, budget range, timeline and the decision maker are known |
| Scoped | You understand the job well enough to price it | Site visit or specification done, requirement confirmed in writing |
| Proposed | A quotation or proposal is with the buyer | Sent to a named person, with a follow-up date agreed |
| Negotiation | The buyer is working on terms | Objections heard, price and terms discussed with whoever signs |
| Won or lost | Decided | A recorded reason, and for losses, the competitor if you know it |
The right-hand column is the part that changes behaviour. Without it, "qualified" means whatever the salesperson wants it to mean on a Friday afternoon.
A worked example
For example, imagine a commercial printing business in Bengaluru selling packaging cartons and labels to food and pharmaceutical brands. The details and figures below are illustrative. The enquiry usually arrives from a purchase executive asking for a rate for a carton, but the orders that actually come through all share the same path:
- A sample of the existing carton is collected
- A die and artwork discussion happens with the brand's design or quality person
- A physical dummy is produced and approved
- A rate is quoted against that exact specification
- A trial order of a smaller quantity follows
Once that firm wrote those stages down, two things changed. Quotations against an emailed rate request with no sample stopped, because that stage could not be exited. The pipeline showed six of eleven live deals stuck at "dummy approval", waiting on the customer's quality team. The owner had something specific to chase. That beats telling the team to follow up more.
Illustrative arithmetic makes the same point. If 100 enquiries produce 60 qualified, 35 scoped, 30 proposed and 9 orders, you know your weakest link is qualification to scoping and can go and look at why. Those numbers are an example of the shape of a funnel, not a target.
Make it survive contact with a busy week
A process fails when it depends on people remembering. Three supports keep it alive.
One place to record deals, whether that is a CRM or a shared sheet, with the stage, the value, the next action and a date on every live deal. No next action means the deal is not live.
One weekly review of thirty minutes, looking only at deals whose next action date has passed, and at anything in the same stage for more than three weeks. Not a general discussion about the market.
One set of documents per stage, so that "send the proposal" means a known template with the customer's requirement restated in it, rather than something typed from scratch at nine in the evening.
What to report
Four numbers a month, by salesperson and by source: deals entering the pipeline, deals moving stage, orders won with their value, and losses with reasons. Conversion between adjacent stages is what tells you where to coach. Total activity tells you almost nothing.
What to do next
Write the stages for your own business this week using the last ten orders, then put every live deal into one of them with a next action and a date. The exercise usually takes two hours and produces an uncomfortable list of deals nobody has touched in a month. If you want that done alongside a look at where enquiries are being lost before they ever reach the pipeline, tell us what you need.
