Fixing a Broken Sales Process Without Starting Over
The pull in a broken sales process is to fix everything at once, and Eric Housh named that instinct directly when he asked Max Bevan where a business should begin on a recent episode of The Fast Slow Motion Podcast. Max is our principal account executive at Fast Slow Motion, and his answer starts with sequencing and with an honest look at what the business already has. This post covers the quick wins he named, the questions that show where a business stands, how to define done, and how to keep changes small enough to test. It’s part of a group of posts that start with Why Your Sales Pipeline Isn’t Closing Deals.
Skip the Urge to Fix Everything at Once
Max’s first response was that a broken pipeline is what our team deals with every day, and that hearing about one means we get to partner with the business, offer guidance, and help get it fixed. The goal, he said, is to avoid boiling the ocean. A business can’t jump from A to Z, but it can move from A to B to C to D, so the work starts by asking what will move the needle fastest from where the business stands today.
Quick Wins Worth Looking At
Max listed a few examples of what a first step might be. Standardizing the sales process is one, and building automation around reminders, tasks, and follow-up is another. Others were a clean handoff process from sales to service once a deal closes, and better visibility into invoicing and receivables. He said all of these matter, and that as a business scales it needs tooling to support them, though where to start always depends on where the business currently stands. HubSpot Automation That Keeps Deals Moving covers the automation examples in HubSpot.
Start From Where the Business Stands
The conversation framed this as meeting the customer where they are. Does the business already have a CRM, and are people trained on it? Is it functioning well, with solid infrastructure that needs adoption and training instead of a rebuild? Or are there cultural issues at play, such as rogue behavior on the sales team that could be the real fix needed?
The answers point to different kinds of work. As Max described our approach, we try to be prescriptive about where incremental value can be added: whether the business needs training, whether there’s an automation opportunity, whether something needs to be rebuilt, or whether the process itself needs rethinking instead of the tools.
That approach also means saying things a prospect may not expect to hear. Max said our job is to tell a business what it needs to hear instead of what it wants to hear, and to be a consultative partner who pushes back when necessary. When a business already has solid processes, infrastructure, and tooling, we’ll say so, and point out that the real issue may be a culture problem, a rogue leader, or a lone-wolf mentality. He added that it may not be the dashboards, the tooling, or the automation at all.
Define What Done Looks Like
Max also pushes for an objective definition of done: what a successful outcome would look like for both sides once a given goal is met. A client might say they just need reps closing more revenue, and he treats that as a fine high-level goal that still needs a step back to ask which habits produce it. The answer could be activity levels, outbound outreach, or automation for efficiency, or tools like shared calendars and deal rooms that support deal velocity, and he said it isn’t always that straightforward. Find the Sales Habits That Produce Revenue goes further on finding those habits.
From there, Max asks what difference it would make for the team to do that consistently. The answers he described were a higher close rate, a larger average deal size, and better-quality deals.
Build, Test, and Refine
Once a business has picked a habit and named the result it expects, Max’s next step is to implement it and test it. That includes running it through UAT and training, watching the data, and continuing to refine from there. He described the aim as improving 1 percent every day, instead of expecting to transform tooling, process, and culture overnight.
Max didn’t put a timeline on any of this, and he didn’t rank the quick wins in a fixed order, since where to begin depends on the business.
Listen to the full podcast episode here.