The sales process · Running the process
Name your pipeline stages after what the buyer did, not how the deal feels.
Pipeline stages and CRM are where the selling gets recorded. A short list of stages every deal passes through, and one shared place holding who is buying, what it is worth and what happens next. GullySales agrees the stages with your team first, then fits the software to them.
In one paragraph
Pipeline stages and CRM are where the selling gets recorded. A short list of stages every deal passes through, and one shared place holding who is buying, what it is worth and what happens next. GullySales agrees the stages with your team first, then fits the software to them.
Most steps in this process happen in order, one after another. The pipeline is not one of them. It runs underneath the whole sequence, from the first prospecting call to the day an order is confirmed.
A CRM is a customer relationship management system, which in daily use is a shared list of deals with a stage, a value and a date against each one. The stages are the part that decides everything else. Get them wrong and the software records the wrong thing faster.
So write the stages before you shop for software. An afternoon with a whiteboard, the owner, whoever answers the phone and whoever prepares the quotations will produce five or six stages that fit your business. Buying first and adapting afterwards is how a firm ends up selling the way a template expects.
Where this sits
Stage 10 of 10, running the process. Where the work is recorded and the meeting where it is managed, both running the whole year.
- The stage before
- After the order
If you want this done for you
Set the CRM up to match your sales stages, not the vendor's default template.
The work
What this step is actually like.
“A stage is a fact, not a temperature”
Quotation sent. Sample approved. Site visited. Purchase order expected by a named date. Anyone in the office can check whether those things happened, which means two people reading the same deal put it in the same place. Hot, warm and promising cannot be checked, and they mean something different in every head in the room.
“The next-step column is the whole test”
Open the pipeline and read down that column. Every blank one is a deal that exists only in somebody's memory of a good meeting, and it inflates a total the owner makes decisions on. Give each blank either a dated next step or a month to be looked at again in a separate parked list.
“Six things to record, and a long list to refuse”
Company, what they want to buy, value, stage, source, and the next step with its date. That is enough to run a small firm. Call durations, mood ratings and a field for every possible answer are work you are handing a salesperson at ten at night. They get filled in with whatever closes the screen fastest.
“Where this fails, and it is rarely the software”
A system bought in March and abandoned by June. A stage called negotiation that means four different things to four people. Fourteen mandatory fields, so deals get created outside the system to avoid them. A tidy CRM three weeks out of date is worse than the ugly sheet it replaced, because the sheet was current and everybody opened it.
What we do
What you end up with.
The artefacts this step produces, what each one is for, and how you know it is finished.
The stage list on one page
Five or six stages, each with one line saying what must already have happened for a deal to sit there, and who is allowed to move it forward.
Result: Two people looking at the same deal file it in the same stage.
The deal record, eight columns wide
Company, contact, what they are buying, value, source, stage, next step, date of that next step. No ninth column until you have missed one twice.
Result: Any live deal can be explained from the screen without ringing the salesperson.
An entry rule for what counts as a deal
One sentence saying when an enquiry becomes a deal, usually when somebody has spoken to a buyer and there is something real to quote for.
Result: The pipeline counts deals rather than every message that ever arrived.
A parked list, kept away from the total
Real buyers who are dormant, each with the month they should be raised again and one line on what would wake them up.
Result: Nobody has to subtract dead deals in their head before reading the total.
Why us
Why owners pick GullySales over an agency.
Marketing and sales, as one job
Most agencies stop at the enquiry. We also fix what happens after it: the reply, the follow-up, the quote and the CRM.
The person on the first call does the work
No account managers in between. You are never handed to someone you have not met.
A baseline before anything starts
Your numbers are written down on day one, so every monthly report compares against something honest.
The fee in writing, split three ways
Our time, your media spend and production on separate lines. You always see what goes to us.
No lock-in, no guarantees we cannot keep
Three to six months at a time. We never promise a ranking or a lead count, because nobody controls those.
One office, and we say so
Nagarbhavi, Bengaluru. We work across India by call and WhatsApp and travel when a session needs to be in person.
#257, 3rd floor, Sri Nanjundeshwara Complex, Nagarbhavi 8th Block, Outer Ring Road. How we work.
The offer
Start with a free audit of how you sell.
It is useful on its own, whether or not you hire us.
What you receive
- A 90-minute call with the person who will do the work
- A written, scored report on the six places orders leak, within a few working days
- Every fix ranked by what it returns and what it costs
- The one thing to do first, and why
- An honest line on whether you need outside help at all
- If you do, the scope and the fee in writing
No invoice. No obligation. No sales script.
FAQ
Questions owners ask before they call.
Not here? More answers, or ask on WhatsApp.
We run on a spreadsheet. Is that a problem?
How do we know our stages are written properly?
Our team will not update it. What do we do?
What about the deals already sitting in there?
How much does it cost?
How long is the contract?
How soon will we see results?
Who will actually do the work?
What do you need from us?
What if we are not happy with the work?
Where to go next
The work that carries this step further.
The rest of running the process
Or read the whole sales process in order.