Sales process documentation: write it so a new hire can run it

A new salesperson sits down on Monday and asks the only question that matters: "what do I do with this enquiry?" If the answer is "ask Sunil", your process lives in Sunil. Writing it down works when the result is not a manual but a stack of short cards, one per step. Each card says what starts the step, what the person does, who owns it and what "done" looks like on the screen or the sheet. A new hire can open one card, act and move on.

Why long process documents go unread

The usual draft is prose, in the order the owner thinks about the business: philosophy first, then the stages, then a paragraph on follow-up. A salesperson with a phone in hand and a buyer waiting cannot search that, so they ask the senior colleague, and the document becomes a file nobody opens.

A card should take about a minute to read and can be checked afterwards. That second part matters. If "done" is vague, you cannot tell whether the step happened. If "done" is "status reads Quoted and the quote file is saved in the customer folder", you can.

One card, filled in

Five lines, no more. Here is an illustrative one, for a dealer who sells farm equipment:

STEP:     Qualify a farmer enquiry
TRIGGER:  Status in the sheet changes to Contacted
DO:       Ask four things: tractor make and horsepower, acreage,
          crop, and whether the field is ready for the implement.
          Type each answer in its own column.
OWNER:    The salesperson who made the first call. Cover: team lead.
DONE:     All four columns filled, plus yes or no for a site visit.

Two points about this card. The trigger is an event on the sheet, not a feeling such as "when appropriate". And the owner is a role with a named cover, because a step that belongs to everyone belongs to no one. Not every card will be this clean at first. Rewriting a vague "done" into something visible is the main skill.

Find the steps from your wins, not from your imagination

Take the last five orders you won and walk each backwards from the payment received to the first message. Write down what really happened, awkward parts included: the quote redone twice, the call that happened only because the customer chased.

Lay the five histories side by side. A step that appears in all five becomes a card. A step that appears in only one or two is either an exception or the thing your best salesperson does that others skip. Ask which. If it is the second, make it a card. This is how knowledge in one head moves onto paper.

Then do the same with two lost deals. The point where they died tells you which card needs the most care.

A farm-equipment dealer in Hisar

Here is an invented example. A dealer in Hisar sells rotavators, seed drills and sprayers to farmers and to small dealers in nearby villages. The owner and one senior salesperson handle everything, and two new hires join before the sowing season.

The owner's first draft was a two-page note called "How we sell", telling people to "qualify properly" and "follow up well". A trial with one new hire exposed the problem on the first day. The new hire did not know what qualified meant. The first rotavator was quoted without asking the tractor's horsepower, and it was too heavy for the farmer's tractor. Nobody had said the follow-up date was theirs to set.

The rewrite had eleven cards, and the farmer-qualifying card shown above is the one that changed. The same hire ran three enquiries from the cards and asked two questions, both of which went into the cards that evening. Dealers buying for resale did not fit the qualifying card, and those enquiries stayed with the owner until a separate card was written. The owner kept one rule while the cards settled: when a new hire asked the owner something a card should have answered, the owner answered, then edited the card before the end of the day.

Keep the cards where the work happens

A document in a drawer or a PDF in an email is dead on arrival. If you use a CRM, link each card from the status it belongs to. If you use a shared sheet, keep the cards in the same workbook, one tab each.

Give the set one keeper. That person reads the cards whenever the process changes, such as a new price list or a new lead source, and edits the card the same day. Put the date of the last change on every card so a reader can see it is current.

When not to write cards yet

Skip them if you have not settled how you sell. If three salespeople run three sequences and nobody is sure which works, documenting all three makes the muddle official. Fix the sequence first, perhaps by comparing win histories as above. The note on why salespeople do not follow the process covers what to do when the sequence exists but is ignored.

Skip heavy documentation too when the only salesperson is the owner. One page listing the steps and statuses will do. Cards earn their effort when the second and third seller arrive. For a model to start from, the sales process template for a service business lists typical steps.

Write the first three cards from your last win

Open the last order you won. Write the first three things that happened as three index cards, using the five lines. Revenue process documentation is the service that writes the full set with you, and the rest of our sales work sits under sales. To start, tell us what you need.