Is Your Sales Team Progressing Opportunities Before They’re Ready?

And one of the things we see constantly are sales teams progressing opportunities through their pipeline without really understanding the selling work that should be happening at each stage. 

Not because they’re doing a bad job. 

Most salespeople are just trying to move things forward. They’re trying to get deals done. They’re trying to keep momentum going. But often they haven’t actually been taught how to think about the relationship between the buyer journey, the sales process, and the selling work required at each point in the opportunity. 

This is one of the reasons we spend so much time working with organisations on their pipeline process before we even get into B2B sales training. 

Because sales training on its own often doesn’t solve the problem when gaps in understanding the sales process exist. 

You can teach people better questioning skills and objection handling and all of those things. But if the sales process underneath it isn’t clear, salespeople are still making judgement calls individually about what should happen next, when to progress an opportunity, when to quote, when to present, when to demo, or when to educate. 

And when this is occurring, that’s when things start becoming inconsistent. 

The selling work often gets skipped without anyone realising 

We work with a lot of organisations that provide product demonstrations, product trials or samples as part of their sales process. 

A lot of salespeople think:
“If I can just get the product in front of the customer quickly, that’ll help move things along.” 

So they offer a sample, a demo or an education session. 

But often they’re introducing those things far too early in the process before the customer is actually ready for them. 

And then what happens? 

The sample sits unopened.
The demo becomes a show and tell.
The education session is interesting but doesn’t actually move the buyer forward. 

The salesperson feels like they’re progressing the opportunity, but often they’ve just skipped over a heap of important selling work. 

We see the same thing happen with quoting. 

A customer asks for pricing and the salesperson jumps straight into quote generation mode without really understanding what’s driving the enquiry, what problem the customer is trying to solve, what the impact of that problem is, or whether the opportunity is even properly qualified. 

And then later, organisations wonder why proposal conversion rates are low. 

A lot of the time, the issue started much earlier in the sales process. 

This is also why so many organisations get frustrated with their CRM 

Many organisations have CRMs. Most are capturing activity. But not all organisations are using that information in a meaningful way to coach salespeople, improve sales capability, or strengthen pipeline management. 

So sales teams end up feeling like they’re spending hours updating systems that don’t really help them sell more effectively. 

And then the data integrity falls apart because people stop seeing the value in it. 

A pipeline shouldn’t just be a reporting tool. It should help salespeople think more clearly about buyer progression and the work required to move opportunities through the process properly. 

Good sales process should help salespeople think more clearly 

That’s where a good sales process becomes valuable. 

Not as admin or compliance, but as a framework that helps salespeople understand:
Where each buyer is actually at.
What selling work still needs to happen. 
And have we really earned the right to move this opportunity forward? 

It sounds simple when you say it out loud, but most organisations are still not doing this particularly well. 

And it’s usually sitting underneath a lot of the commercial frustration’s leaders are trying to solve. 

If this is something your organisation is struggling with, you can listen to Christina Bruce unpack these ideas further in the latest episode of the How I Sell This podcast. 

You can also learn more about Sellabilities’ approach to B2B sales training, pipeline management and sales process development here.