The Problem May Be Your Sales Process
When a sales team isn’t hitting its targets, the natural reaction is to look at the salespeople. Are they making enough calls? Are they generating enough opportunities? Do they need more training? Do we need better salespeople? Do we need more leads?
Sometimes one of those things is the problem. But if you have capable people, genuine opportunities and a product or service that customers value, there is another question worth asking:
Are your salespeople actually following the same sales process?
I’ve spent more than 30 years in sales, and one of the patterns I’ve repeatedly seen is that companies can set the same targets for everybody while allowing each salesperson to work towards those targets in a completely different way.
One person qualifies thoroughly. Another doesn’t. One understands the customer’s commercial problem before presenting a solution. Another starts talking about the product within minutes. One establishes value before discussing price. Another discounts when the customer pushes back. One agrees a clear next step. Another sends a proposal and follows up a week later.
The target is standardised.
The way people are expected to achieve it isn’t.
And that can be one of the hidden reasons a B2B sales team consistently misses its targets.
Why Is My Sales Team Not Hitting Targets?
There is no single reason a sales team misses its targets. Poor lead quality, unrealistic targets, market conditions, pricing, weak positioning, insufficient activity and individual performance can all play a part.
But when experienced salespeople are busy, opportunities are entering the pipeline and results remain inconsistent, the sales process itself needs to be examined.
A good place to start is not with how many opportunities you have, but with what happens to those opportunities once a salesperson begins a conversation.
How are opportunities qualified? What does discovery actually uncover? How is value established? When are proposals sent? How are objections handled? What determines whether an opportunity moves forward? How is the next step agreed?
If every salesperson answers those questions differently, you may have identified part of the problem.
You don’t simply have different personalities in the sales team. You have different sales processes.
More Leads Won’t Fix a Broken Sales Process
When revenue falls behind target, one of the most common responses is to increase activity at the top of the funnel.
We need more leads. More appointments. More conversations. More opportunities in the pipeline.
That makes sense if the real constraint is a lack of opportunity.
But if the existing sales process is losing deals that could have been won, adding more leads may simply put more opportunities through the same broken process.
Imagine 100 genuine opportunities entering your pipeline. If poor qualification, weak discovery, premature proposals or inconsistent follow-up are causing good opportunities to be lost, increasing the number to 150 doesn’t address the underlying issue.
Before automatically asking, “How do we get more leads?”, ask another question:
“How many of the opportunities we’re already getting should we be winning?”
That’s a very different conversation.
It moves the focus away from activity alone and towards the quality and consistency of the sales process.
Are Your Salespeople Actually Selling the Same Way?
This is one of the simplest tests you can perform.
Take the people involved in sales and ask each of them separately:
“Talk me through exactly how we take a potential customer from the first meaningful conversation to a closed deal.”
Then listen.
You don’t need everyone to use identical words. You don’t want to remove personality from selling. But you should hear a recognisable common process.
How do they establish whether there is a genuine opportunity? What information needs to be understood? What makes an opportunity qualified? When should a proposal be produced? What needs to happen before the deal moves to the next stage?
If you receive completely different answers, the business may have a CRM and defined pipeline stages, but it doesn’t necessarily have a shared sales process.
This becomes particularly important in founder-led B2B companies.
The founder may have spent years developing an instinctive understanding of customers. They know which questions to ask, when to challenge something, when an opportunity feels real and when something doesn’t add up.
As the business grows and one or two people become involved in sales, that knowledge needs to become transferable.
Otherwise, the founder’s experience remains in the founder’s head.
A CRM Pipeline Is Not a Sales Process
Most businesses already have something they call a sales process.
It might look like this:
Lead → Qualified → Discovery → Demo → Proposal → Negotiation → Closed
Those stages are useful. They tell you where an opportunity supposedly sits in the pipeline.
But they don’t tell you what happened inside the sales conversation.
Take the word qualified.
What does qualified mean in your company?
Does it mean the prospect agreed to a meeting? Does it mean they asked for a proposal? Or does it mean the salesperson understands the customer’s problem, its commercial impact, why they want to change, who is involved in the decision, the likely timeframe and whether there is a genuine reason to proceed?
If those criteria aren’t defined, one salesperson’s qualified opportunity can be another salesperson’s early-stage enquiry.
That creates problems throughout the pipeline.
The forecast becomes unreliable because opportunities aren’t being measured against the same standard. Proposals are sent to prospects who aren’t ready. Managers believe there are more genuine opportunities than actually exist.
The CRM isn’t necessarily wrong.
The information going into it is inconsistent.
Look at What Happens Inside the Sales Conversation
This is why I believe a professional sales process has to go deeper than a series of stages.
In the SalesCraft™ Commercial Standard, I structure the process around five phases:
Connect → Research → Adapt → Finalise → Tie-Up
The purpose isn’t to turn salespeople into robots or give everybody a rigid script. It’s to create a shared architecture underneath the sales conversation.
Connect
Before trying to sell anything, establish why the conversation is happening and whether there is enough relevance and trust to continue.
The objective isn’t endless small talk. It’s creating the conditions for a meaningful commercial conversation.
Research
This is where the salesperson needs to understand what is really happening.
What is the customer’s current situation? What problem are they trying to solve? What is the impact of that problem? Why does it matter now? What would a successful outcome look like? Who else is involved?
Weak discovery creates problems later in the sale because the salesperson is trying to build a solution without fully understanding the problem.
Adapt
Once the situation is understood, the salesperson can connect the solution to what actually matters to that customer.
Customers rarely buy features simply because they exist. They buy what those features allow them to achieve.
The job of the salesperson is to connect the solution to the customer’s real commercial outcome rather than delivering the same presentation to everybody.
Finalise
Closing shouldn’t suddenly begin when a proposal has been sent.
The decision has been developing throughout the sales process.
By this point, both parties should understand the problem, the desired outcome, the proposed solution and the value of solving the issue. Concerns and objections need to be clarified rather than immediately argued against.
The objective is to understand what is genuinely preventing the customer from moving forward.
Tie-Up
Every meaningful sales conversation should finish with clarity around what happens next.
Who is doing what? Why? Who else needs to be involved? When will the next action happen?
“Leave it with me and I’ll follow up next week” isn’t a particularly strong next step.
A clear next step doesn’t guarantee the deal will close, but it dramatically reduces unnecessary ambiguity.
Five Signs Your Sales Process May Be Contributing to Missed Targets
A missed sales target alone doesn’t prove that your sales process is broken. But there are several warning signs worth investigating.
1. Salespeople qualify opportunities differently. If there is no shared definition of a qualified opportunity, your pipeline can look healthier than it really is.
2. Too many proposals go nowhere. A high number of proposals can look like good sales activity. But if those proposals aren’t converting, ask whether they are being produced before enough value and commitment have been established.
3. Your forecast keeps changing. Deals expected this month continually move into next month because the sales stages are based on salesperson opinion rather than clear progression criteria.
4. Prospects regularly disappear. Some ghosting is unavoidable. But if it happens repeatedly after good conversations or proposals, examine how value, concerns and next steps are being handled earlier in the process.
5. Important deals keep coming back to the founder. The founder doesn’t necessarily need to leave sales. But if the business depends on the founder to rescue, progress or close important opportunities, the sales process hasn’t yet become independent of the individual.
Any one of these can affect revenue. Several appearing together usually deserve closer examination.
Why Good Salespeople Can Still Produce Inconsistent Results
One of the mistakes companies make is assuming inconsistency automatically means they have the wrong people.
You can have good salespeople and still have an inconsistent sales department.
Experienced salespeople arrive with their own habits, techniques and beliefs about what works. That experience can be extremely valuable, but without a shared commercial standard, every new salesperson effectively brings another sales process into the business.
One salesperson may be exceptional at relationships but weak at qualification. Another may have strong technical knowledge but present too early. Another may be a good closer but allow too many weak opportunities to consume time.
Training individual skills can help, but the company also needs an agreed architecture for how it sells.
That’s why I use the phrase:
Standardise the process, not the personality.
Good salespeople should still sound like themselves.
What shouldn’t change dramatically from person to person is the standard against which opportunities are qualified, researched, progressed and concluded.
Why Sales Targets Alone Don’t Improve Sales Performance
Targets are necessary. People need to understand what is expected of them.
But a target tells somebody what result you want.
It doesn’t necessarily tell them how the organisation expects them to sell.
Telling somebody they need to produce €1 million in revenue this year doesn’t define how they should qualify an opportunity, conduct discovery, establish value, handle objections or progress a deal.
If those things are left entirely to individual interpretation, management can end up reviewing numbers after the event rather than improving the behaviours that create those numbers.
This is where a commercial sales standard becomes valuable.
A target gives you the destination.
A sales standard gives you a repeatable way of getting there.
What Should a Founder Do When the Sales Team Keeps Missing Target?
Before assuming you need more leads, another salesperson or another sales training programme, diagnose where the current process is breaking down.
Start with your lost opportunities.
Take a selection of deals you genuinely believed you should have won and examine what happened. Don’t simply record “lost on price” or “went with competitor”. Go further.
When did the deal begin to lose momentum? What did we know about the customer’s real problem? Had we established the impact? Were we speaking with the right people? Did we understand how the decision would be made? Was the proposal sent too early? Did we uncover concerns before the final stage? Was there a clearly agreed next step?
Then compare several deals.
Patterns often start to appear.
You may discover that the team is presenting too early. You may find that opportunities are entering the pipeline without being properly qualified. Perhaps proposals are being used as a way of finding out whether prospects are serious rather than as the natural outcome of a well-developed sales conversation.
That gives you something much more useful than simply saying:
“We need to sell more.”
You can identify the part of the process that needs to improve.
Don’t Just Measure What You Won. Look at What You Shouldn’t Have Lost
Most sales dashboards naturally focus on revenue, pipeline, conversion rates and targets.
Those numbers matter.
But there is another question I believe more companies should ask:
How many deals did we lose that we could have won?
That’s where some of the most valuable information in a sales department can be found.
Not every lost deal is a failure. Sometimes the competitor genuinely has the better solution. Sometimes budgets disappear. Sometimes priorities change. Sometimes the correct sales decision is to walk away.
But if good-fit opportunities are repeatedly being lost because discovery was weak, value wasn’t established, decision-makers weren’t identified or concerns appeared too late, those aren’t simply lost deals.
They are evidence.
They show you where the sales process needs to improve.
From Sales Targets to a Commercial Sales Standard
If a B2B company wants more consistent sales performance, setting targets is only one part of the job.
The business also needs to define the standard behind the target.
How should an opportunity be qualified? What should discovery uncover? How should value be established? When should a proposal be produced? How should concerns be handled? What must happen before an opportunity progresses? How should the next step be agreed?
When those expectations are clear, sales management changes.
Instead of only asking whether somebody hit the number, you can examine the process producing the number.
Instead of relying entirely on individual instinct, you have something that can be coached.
Instead of every salesperson developing their own approach, the company begins building commercial knowledge that belongs to the business.
That’s the difference between simply having people who sell and developing a professional sales function.
Is Your Sales Team Missing Target Because of the People or the Process?
It could be either.
Sometimes a salesperson isn’t performing and needs coaching, development or a different role. Sometimes the business doesn’t have enough opportunities. Sometimes the offer, market or positioning needs work.
But don’t automatically blame the people.
If capable salespeople are working hard and the results remain inconsistent, examine the system they’re working within.
Ask whether everybody is operating to the same qualification criteria. Look at what happens inside sales conversations. Examine why good-fit opportunities are being lost. Look at when the founder has to step in and why.
You may discover that the problem isn’t that your salespeople don’t know how to sell.
The problem may be that the company has never clearly defined how it sells.
That’s what I mean by a commercial sales standard.
And that’s what SalesCraft™ is designed to install.
About Joe Dalton
Joe Dalton is the creator of the SalesCraft™ Commercial Standard and works with founders and CEOs of established B2B companies to create a more consistent, structured and measurable way of selling.
With more than 30 years in sales, Joe’s work focuses on moving companies away from sales that depends on individual instinct towards a professional commercial standard that can be taught, coached, measured and improved.
If sales still depends too heavily on individual people — or important deals keep finding their way back to you — the first step is to identify where the real constraint sits.