Notes for owners · Sales management
Hire help for your sales process, or do it yourself?
Whether to build your sales process alone depends on what your records hold. A short test of seven questions shows when you can do it yourself and what outside help can and cannot add.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
On this page
Build the sales process yourself if your records are good enough to show where deals stall and you are willing to change what they show. Hire help when the records are too thin to show anything, when you are the process and cannot see it from inside, or when you tried and the document sits unread. Outside help brings a second pair of eyes and a habit of review. It does not bring knowledge of your buyers, and it cannot make a team follow a page they dislike.
What does your record test look like?
Answer these seven questions about your last three months. Be strict with yourself. "Roughly" counts as no, and so does "I think so".
- Is every enquiry written somewhere, with the date and where it came from?
- Can you say how many reached a quote and how many ended in an order?
- For lost deals, do you know the reason the buyer gave?
- Can you say how long a typical deal takes from enquiry to order?
- Does more than one person write into the same record?
- When a deal stalls, can you find the date of the last contact?
- Have you reviewed these records at least once with someone else in the room?
These thresholds are rough guides, not a measurement. Five or more yeses: do it yourself, and use this one-page method. Three or four: do it yourself, but spend a few weeks fixing the weak records first. Two or fewer: the records are the first piece of work, and that is where outside help does most good.
What can outside help add, and what can it not?
Be exact here, because this is where owners are disappointed.
| Outside help can | Outside help cannot |
|---|---|
| Spot a stage you cannot see because you stand inside it | Know your buyers' habits better than you do |
| Ask the awkward question about a favourite salesperson | Make a team member follow a process they resent |
| Bring a record-keeping habit and hold the review | Replace your own time in the review |
| Compare how similar trades run their stages | Promise a rise in orders |
| Write the document quickly | Make it true if the facts fed in are wrong |
Treat any offer to "fix your sales" in a fixed number of days as a warning. A process is a draft until it has run on real deals.
For example: a steel-utensil maker in Jagadhri
Imagine a steel-utensil maker in Jagadhri who sells to wholesalers in a dozen states. Orders arrive by phone and through the wholesalers' agents. Most of the history sits in the owner's memory and a stack of order books. A relative told the owner to hire a consultant. The owner ran the seven questions first and scored two.
The books held orders but not enquiries, so the owner could not say how many wholesalers had asked for a rate and bought elsewhere. Paying for a process document on top of that would have produced a tidy page about stages nobody could check. The owner gave the office clerk one job instead: write down every enquiry with its date, source and result, including the lost ones, for a quarter. The first quarter's sheets held 112 enquiries, 31 of which got a rate quote and 9 an order (invented figures). They also missed every call that came through the wholesalers' agents, a gap nobody noticed until the totals looked low. Even so, the owner rescored at five. At that point the choice changed: the stages could be written from the sheets, with an outside reader kept for one review of the draft.
When should you do it yourself even if it is hard?
Do it yourself when the main obstacle is your own willingness to change. A consultant's stage list that you then ignore is a paid file. The same hours spent interviewing your best salesperson and reading your last twenty lost quotes cost only time, and they leave the knowledge in the right head.
Do it yourself, too, when sales rest on the owner's personal relationships and nobody else will sell. A process for a one-person sale is a note to yourself, not a project.
When is outside help the better route?
There are four situations where it clearly is.
- You are the process, and every attempt to describe it turns into a list of exceptions.
- Three or more people keep records that disagree, and nobody has the standing to settle it.
- You tried before and the page was never opened. Someone outside the daily argument may find the cause sooner, and it is often a missing review habit and not a missing page.
- You are about to add a product, a city or a channel and want the process to survive the change.
Even then, ask what you will be doing. If the answer is "nothing, we deliver it", be wary. The good version needs your time for the interviews, your salespeople in the room, and your decision on who owns each stage. When should a company hire a sales consultant covers the commercial side.
A seven-question score for this week
Score yourself today. At five or more, put one afternoon in the diary to write the stages from your records, using the sales process pages as a map. Lower, start the one-line-per-enquiry record now and score again when you hold a quarter of it. If you cannot tell which side you fall on, sales process design can read your records with you, and you can tell us what you need.
