Sales Process

Which sales job owns the outcome you are trying to change?

Sales is accountable for the work between a qualified market and a signed customer handed over to delivery. Its first work is choosing where to sell; its last is handing a closed customer to the people who serve them. Marketing sits upstream and creates the demand this function converts. Delivery sits downstream and owns the customer after handover.

This page is the inventory, built with Process Inventory: every job the function must manage, whether or not it has a page yet. A job with no page is a declared gap, not an absence.

The Inventory

Twenty-one jobs across eight stages. Each carries a stable ID that survives a retitle or a route change, because the allocation matrix keys off it.

Plan

1. Define the sales strategy — sales.define-sales-strategy — core — GAP — Chooses the segments, offers, channels, and coverage model sales will pursue.
2. Set targets and capacity — sales.set-targets-and-capacity — core — GAP — Sets the revenue target, quota, and the capacity required to carry it.
3. Design the funnel — sales.design-funnel — core — Designs pipeline stages, entry and exit criteria, and the conversion measures each stage reports.

Prospect

4. Generate leads — sales.generate-leads — core — Produces a flow of prospects matching the ideal customer profile.
5. Qualify leads — sales.qualify-leads — core — Decides which prospects earn selling time, and records why the rest did not.

Engage

6. Run discovery — sales.run-discovery — core — GAP — Establishes the prospect's real problem, decision process, and constraints.
7. Develop the pitch — sales.develop-pitch — core — Frames the offer as the answer to the problem discovery found.

Propose

8. Develop the proposal — sales.develop-proposal — core — GAP — Turns an agreed shape of work into a document the buyer can approve.
9. Respond to an RFP — sales.respond-to-rfp — supplemental — GAP — Answers a formal bid within its rules and deadline.
10. Agree price and terms — sales.agree-price-and-terms — core — GAP — Sets the commercial shape within the boundaries Pricing owns.

Close

11. Negotiate the deal — sales.negotiate-deal — core — GAP — Trades concessions to reach terms both sides will honour.
12. Secure approvals — sales.secure-approvals — core — GAP — Obtains internal sign-off and executes the contract, with Legal holding the risk boundary.

Hand over

13. Hand over to delivery — sales.hand-over-to-delivery — core — GAP — Transfers commitments, context, and expectations so delivery starts from truth rather than from the pitch.

Retain and expand

14. Manage account strategy — sales.manage-account-strategy — supplemental — GAP — Chooses where to deepen a relationship, including which executive relationships to hold.
15. Manage the customer lifecycle — sales.manage-customer-lifecycle — core — Runs renewal, expansion, and churn risk across the life of the account.

Govern

16. Forecast and review the pipeline — sales.forecast-and-review-pipeline — core — GAP — Compares committed revenue with observed pipeline on a fixed cadence.
17. Maintain pipeline data quality — sales.maintain-pipeline-data-quality — core — GAP — Keeps the record true enough that the forecast and every gauge above it mean something.
18. Review wins and losses — sales.review-win-loss — core — GAP — Reads closed deals for what should change in the jobs above.
19. Enable the team — sales.enable-the-team — supplemental — GAP — Equips sellers and agents with the collateral, training, and answers the jobs require.
20. Monitor competitors — sales.monitor-competitors — supplemental — GAP — Tracks competing offers closely enough to respond in live deals.
21. Handle escalations — sales.handle-escalations — supplemental — GAP — Resolves a deal, commitment, or relationship that has left the normal path.

Two notes on what this list deliberately does and does not contain. Executive selling is not a twenty-second job — it is the executive-relationship task inside sales.manage-account-strategy, and splitting it would create two jobs competing for one owner. Advertising is not a sales job at all; it belongs to Advertising as its own capability, and the earlier version of this page was wrong to list it here.

Coverage

Five jobs of twenty-one have a page. Sixteen are declared gaps.

The gap that costs most is sales.hand-over-to-delivery. Every job above it can run well and still produce a customer who was sold one thing and receives another, because nothing yet defines what transfers at handover. The next two are sales.run-discovery, which every conversion depends on and which no page describes, and sales.maintain-pipeline-data-quality, because the forecast and the allocation figures below are only as true as the record they read.

The governing stage is where inventories usually fail, and it holds the largest cluster of gaps here — all six of its jobs. That is the honest reading: this function is documented for the work of winning a deal and undocumented for the work of running a sales operation.

Allocation

Where each documented job sits between human judgment and agent execution. Figures are dated coverage of tasks, not proof of performance.

Job ID	Stage	Human keeps	Agent does	AI share	Trend
sales.generate-leads	Prospect	ICP judgment, channel strategy	Prospect research, scoring	55%	↑
sales.qualify-leads	Prospect	Fit judgment, relationship read	Lead scoring, data enrichment	60%	↑
sales.design-funnel	Plan	Stage design, conversion strategy	Pipeline analytics, forecasting	50%	↑
sales.develop-pitch	Engage	Value framing, storytelling	Research, deck generation	45%	↑
sales.manage-customer-lifecycle	Retain	Relationship, expansion strategy	Health scoring, churn prediction	55%	↑
sales.run-discovery	Engage	Questioning, rapport, listening	Pre-call research, note-taking	25%	→
sales.respond-to-rfp	Propose	Strategy, value framing, review	Auto-fill, answer generation	70%	↑↑
sales.develop-proposal	Propose	Shape of work, pricing decisions	Content generation, scenarios	55%	↑
sales.negotiate-deal	Close	Concessions, reading the room	Structure modelling, precedent	20%	→
sales.manage-account-strategy	Retain	Approach, stakeholder mapping	Org analysis, stakeholder ID	40%	↑

Aggregate across these ten jobs: 47%, as observed 2026-02. Eleven jobs carry no allocation reading at all — the planning pair, pricing, approvals, handover, and the six governing jobs. Those are gaps in the matrix, not zeroes.

The irreplaceable human edge across this function is trust, relationship depth, genuine curiosity, accountability, and skin in the game. Sales Work Chart holds the fuller position-by-position mapping.

Maturity

Job ID	Maturity	Evidence	Next step
sales.generate-leads	Draft	Workflow documented, not validated	Test with real outreach
sales.qualify-leads	Draft	Scoring framework defined, not tested	Run through 20 prospects
sales.design-funnel	Draft	Stages defined, metrics set	Measure real conversion
sales.manage-customer-lifecycle	Draft	Stages defined, triggers mapped	Implement with first pilot
sales.develop-pitch	Draft	Framework documented	Test on 5 discovery calls
sales.respond-to-rfp	Approved	CRM and RFP tool live, 70% auto-fill	Seed the answer library

Only RFP response has evidence beyond Draft. Treat every figure above as documented intent, not a measured result.

The Agent Team

Documented jobs become procedural memory for a sales agent. Agents take the jobs the allocation table rates AI-led; humans hold the rest.

GENERATE LEADS → QUALIFY LEADS → DESIGN FUNNEL
      ↓                ↓               ↓
 Prospect research  ICP validation  Pipeline tracking
 Multi-channel      Scoring, routing Stage optimisation
 outreach           Go / no-go      Conversion analytics
      ↓                ↓               ↓
      └────────── CRM: shared state ──────────┘
                       ↓
        HUMAN: discovery, negotiation, trust

The handoff point matters more than the split. sales.generate-leads hands a prospect list to human review; sales.qualify-leads hands qualified leads to discovery; sales.respond-to-rfp hands draft answers to expert review. An agent job with no named handoff is an unowned commitment.

Job Page Contract

Every job page here carries the eight-part contract defined in Process Inventory, with the copy-and-fill stencil at Process Template. The task table is the part that matters most: it is what makes a job allocatable rather than merely described.

This page previously carried its own seven-part job standard. The contract now adds the task table and lives at its canonical home, so every function shares one shape.

Context

• depends-on Sales — the capability these jobs run inside.
• depends-on Sales Principles — the rules these jobs run under.
• proved-by Sales Performance — the gauges these jobs move.
• pairs-with Sales Platform — the tools these tasks run on.
• pairs-with Sales Players — who holds each job.
• pairs-with Sales Work Chart — the position-by-position human and agent mapping.
• depends-on Process Inventory — the method that produced this list.
• applies-to Tools and Skills Matrix — where each task row is laid against skills and tools.
• applies-to Inside-Out Storyselling — the method sales.develop-pitch uses to frame an evidence-led transformation.
• contrasts-with Marketing Process — the sister inventory upstream, which creates the demand these jobs convert.

Changes my mind: a practitioner names sales work they must manage that no job here accounts for, and it cannot be composed under an existing job.

Questions

Next question: what transfers at handover, and who signs that it did?

• Which of the six undocumented governing jobs would change a forecast fastest if it were written down?
• Which job here has two owners, and which has none?
• At what deal size does this inventory need a second, enterprise variant rather than more supplemental tasks?