Sales strategy, the selling process and the next agreed action

Open sample lesson. Read the complete lesson, use the exercise and try the quiz without signing up.

Start with a commercial choice

Before choosing scripts or activity targets, define the customer group, problem, offer, route to market and delivery boundary. A sales team cannot compensate indefinitely for an offer that does not fit or work the business cannot perform. The strategy should also say which opportunities will not be pursued.

Set an economic limit. That might concern contribution after direct costs, payment timing or the amount of custom work the team can support. The goal is not to qualify out every difficult customer. It is to recognise what the business is actually committing to.

Seven practical stages

For this lesson, use seven working stages: identify a potentially suitable opportunity, make appropriate contact, understand the situation, assess fit, propose relevant scope, agree a decision and next step, then hand over and follow through. This is an operational teaching map, not a universal seven-step law.

Each stage needs an exit condition. "Proposal sent" describes seller activity. "Customer confirms the scope addresses the problem and agrees when to decide" is stronger evidence of progression. A CRM stage should reflect something observed, not optimism.

The three basic tasks underneath

At a simpler level, sellers need to find appropriate opportunities, help customers make an informed decision and ensure the agreement becomes a dependable handover. These are our three working tasks. Different authors group selling activities differently.

The final task matters because a sale is not finished when the invoice is raised. Misunderstood scope, unrealistic timing and missing information can destroy the value of an apparently successful deal.

Worked example (illustrative): a full pipeline that is not moving

A service firm reports 40 open opportunities. Twelve have agreed next actions, ten need information, eight have no confirmed need and ten have not responded for months. Calling all forty "active pipeline" makes the business look busier than the evidence supports.

The team does not delete opportunities simply because they are old. It reviews each one, records the last customer-confirmed fact and distinguishes active, waiting, unsuitable and uncertain cases. The owner can now see where to act and where a forecast is unsupported.

Build the next-action standard

Every active opportunity should have a purpose, an owner, an action and an agreed or justified date. "Follow up" is too vague. "Send the revised scope on Thursday so the customer can compare the two delivery options" explains why the contact matters.

Huthwaite's methodology distinguishes investigation, demonstration of capability and obtaining commitment. Use that reminder without treating every next step as a demand for a sale. Sometimes the responsible commitment is to obtain missing information or acknowledge that the offer is not suitable.

Review flow, not only totals

Measure progression from comparable starting groups. Quotes created this week and sales closed this week may refer to different opportunities. Report unresolved cases separately. Include reasons for decline where known, and preserve unknown reasons rather than inventing them.

Use the weekly review to decide what to improve. If quotations wait on one person's approval, more prospecting may increase the queue. If suitable demand is genuinely low, acquisition may be the right priority. A useful selling process helps the business tell those problems apart.