Is It a Sales Process … or Is it Dysfunction?
Alana Nicol
Daniel Negreanu does nothing by accident.
Negreanu is, arguably, the greatest poker player of all time. He’s won seven World Series of Poker bracelets and two World Poker Tour (WPT) championship titles. His total winnings, at last count, added up to roughly six million dollars. Maybe we should call him the Six Million Dollar Man. Whatever we call him, though, what we want to be sure we bear in mind is that he didn’t win all that money because he was lucky.
Like every other elite professional gambler, Negreanu has a process. He teaches an online MasterClass course that details that process; I am here to tell you that I got a lot out of that course. Not because I’m a gambler – I have zero poker face – but because I’m a sales professional, and because his course is a powerful reminder of a fundamental selling rule that’s more important today, in the age of AI, than it ever was: Don’t do anything that isn’t backed up by the data. Because if the data doesn’t back up your game, your game doesn’t work.
What’s Your Game Plan?
Another name for “doesn’t work” is “dysfunctional.” Unfortunately, a lot of sales teams are still playing a game plan that they think is a “sales process,” but is actually something very different: sales team dysfunction.
Hear me out. Negreanu uses statistics and data analysis to create a system that helps him understand and respond to every possible combination he could come up against during a poker game. He also has a system for reading his opponent on an emotional level – but that system itself is not emotional. It’s based in results and outcomes he can count and verify over time. Those systems complement and reinforce each other, and combine to form a repeatable process that works. How does he know it works? He wins. He secures revenue.
Every single decision that Negreanu makes at the poker table is based on data, on a well-defined, constantly re-evaluated, data-driven process. That makes sense, right? So let me invite you to and your team to consider the possibility that there may be an important lesson here for sales professionals. Let me challenge you, for just a moment, to think critically for a minute about your data. What, exactly, is the data that your team uses when it’s working deals through your process? Is there data? And if your answer is “Yes”—how do you know?
Whether you track your deals using something low-tech like Excel, or with a tool that’s more cutting-edge – a CRM like HubSpot, or SalesForce say – I want to suggest that you’ve got a professional responsibility to answer questions like this objectively. Not with emotion. With verifiable data.
With that responsibility in mind, I’d like you to consider taking on the following thought exercise: rate the quality of the data that your team is using to make decisions on a scale of one to ten.
One means this: “We use the 1-800-WING-IT method,”
Ten means this: “Listen — because we’re talking about very, very good, verifiable data that we put in consistently, with zero resistance from the team, data we constantly update, data that delivers outcomes we regularly check against reality – because of all that, our sales process can forecast results so accurately that I personally feel comfortable betting my paycheck on it. I would do that right now.”
That’s the scale. So: Where does your sales process fall? Take a moment right now to think about that. Come up with a number.
The Reality Check
Most people we talk to use this challenge as an opportunity be honest with themselves and their team – as a reality check. Usually, after a long and thoughtful silence, the numbers they share with us come in at six or lower. Sometimes way lower.
I am here to tell you that six on a scale of ten would not work for Daniel Negreanu. And it won’t work for you or your team.
Six or lower on this scale is dysfunction. And again, all I mean by that is: The game plan doesn’t work. It doesn’t perform optimally. It doesn’t deliver the results it should. It doesn’t do the job.
Our sales process must help us make good decisions, and we can’t possibly make good decisions without good data. That’s reality. So right now, I’m going to share with you three questions you can use to improve your sales process. Getting to the point where you can answer YES to each of these questions will get you closer to what I call the Professional Poker Champion level – which comes in at nine or higher on the scale I just shared with you.
Question One: Is Your Process Staged to Match What Really Happens When Someone Buys from You?
A functional sales process is realistically staged. That means it identifies all the major real-world steps that an opportunity must go through to close.
In its very simplest form, meaning a transactional sales process without a whole lot of moving parts, the staging might look like this:
- Prospect
- Qualified Prospect
- Verbal Commitment to Buy
That’s the bare-bones version, and it’s only likely to be useful to someone who is selling to a single decision maker with no one else influencing the purchase decision. That’s an increasingly rare scenario. Most of the people we work with have more stages to work through and more people influencing those stages.
The point is, each organization with a sales team needs a process that fits that team like a glove. For that to happen, the stages in that process need to reflect, for each member of the team, what happens in an actual buyer journey that results in a decision to buy. By the way, the more complex the sales process is, the more essential it is to align the process closely with that buyer journey. We always want to meet buyers where they are.
Some teams have three or four steps; some have six; some have more. Typically, the longer the sales cycle is, the more steps there are.
Question Two: How Are the Steps Weighted and Validated?
After we know what the steps are, we want to weight each of them based on the level of confidence we have that an opportunity at a given stage will close.
Let’s use as an example the extremely simple, transactional sales process I shared with you a moment ago. An opportunity that’s in the first step, Prospect, might desrve 10% or less confidence that we’re going to win, because we don’t even know what we don’t know at that point.
By contrast, what’s the likelihood that we’re going to receive the revenue from someone who gives us a Verbal Commitment to Buy? For a lot of teams we work with, that number comes in at about ninety percent.
If you’re using a CRM like HubSpot, you’ve probably noticed that it comes with percentages built into the system. The percentages show up automatically as you build out the stages. That’s fine – as long as the data gets validated.
The fact that we put the label of “10%” or “90%” on the stage does not mean we can assume that that’s what’s happening. It’s our job to compare the estimate with what’s taking place out in the real world, and then adjust accordingly. This is an ongoing process, and it’s something a lot of teams skip. Daniel Negreanu wouldn’t skip this step!
If we go back and look what really is true and see how our deals are closing, the stages and the weights we assign to them will all have verifiable, statistical reality. And since that’s what we want, we make a point of aligning our stages with reality. How often? That depends on the team, but it’s likely, in my experience, to happen somewhere between monthly and quarterly.
Question Three: What Are the Exit Criteria?
The third question is all about the conditions that enable an opportunity to move from one stage to the next.
We’ve got a responsibility to define, in an absolutely crystal-clear, documented way, the precise criteria for exit from each and every stage in our sales process. What’s the information that we need to have before something moves out of Prospect and into Qualified Prospect? What do we need to have done before that can happen? What does the prospect need to have done? We need to get all of that down in black and white for each stage. If the criteria aren’t met, the opportunity does not move forward. Period.
We need to ask ourselves: How well defined are those criteria? And how standardized are they for everyone on our team? How well are all the members of the team observing and using the criteria? And here’s the thing. If people don’t know what the criteria are, if we don’t talk about them on a regular basis, it’s a pretty good bet people won’t be thinking about them and won’t be using them.
In large measure, this third question is the one that most depends on the quality of the leadership. If we’ve identified the stages, and we’ve weighted and validated them properly, but our team has no consistency in terms of what people know about the exit criteria, or how they can go about fulfilling those criteria, that’s a problem for us, as leaders, to solve. And by the way, this is a big part of the value we at Sandler add to sales teams: helping teams and their leaders get on the same page in terms of what the exit criteria are and how to make sure they’re fulfilled before an opportunity moves forward in the process.
The Takeaway
Once you can answer all three of these questions … once you have a viable, data-driven process, and you implement it at the team and the individual level … good things will start to happen. They won’t happen by accident. They won’t happen because people got lucky. They’ll happen because you followed Daniel Negreanu’s lead by working the numbers, creating systems that work in a statistically verifiable way, and incorporating those systems within a sales process that gets deployed consistently.
For help in turning a dysfunctional game plan into one that works, meaning a sales process that’s tailored to your world to consistently deliver the financial results you and your team deserve, why not contact us? We may not be great poker players. But we do know how to help teams set up and execute a sales process that works.
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