Connect
Create the conditions for a meaningful commercial conversation. Establish relevance, credibility and why the conversation is worth having before rushing into a pitch.
B2B Sales Process & Commercial Sales Standard
Your Business Has Grown. Has Your Sales Process Grown With It?
You’ve built a successful B2B company. Operations work. Customers get what you promise. The business may be doing anywhere from $5M to $50M in revenue.
But sales can still feel like the one part of the company that depends too heavily on individual instinct.
One person sells one way. Someone else sells another. Opportunities move through the pipeline differently depending on who is handling them. And when an important deal starts to wobble, the founder can still find themselves pulled back into the sales conversation.
If that sounds familiar, you may not have a salespeople problem. You may have a commercial standard problem.
I help founder-led B2B companies install a professional standard around how they sell, so sales becomes more structured, consistent and predictable.
Recognition
Does Sales Still Depend Too Much on Certain People?
This problem often appears as a B2B company grows. The business becomes more sophisticated, but the way it sells hasn't matured at the same pace.
You may already have one or two good people involved in sales. The founder may still sell because they enjoy it, or they may only step in when a deal becomes important, technical or difficult. Neither is automatically a problem.
The problem is when the company needs particular individuals to make the sales process work.
- Different people qualify opportunities differently.
- Sales conversations depend heavily on personality and experience.
- Good opportunities stall for reasons nobody identified early enough.
- Proposals are sent and prospects disappear.
- Forecasts are based more on opinion than clear qualification criteria.
- Price becomes the focus because value hasn't been established properly.
- Follow-up varies depending on who owns the opportunity.
- The founder still gets pulled into important deals to help move them forward.
These problems can look unrelated. Very often they come from the same underlying issue: there is no shared professional standard for how the company sells.
Stages are not the standard
Having Sales Stages Is Not the Same as Having a Sales Process
Most companies already have some form of sales process. It might look something like this:
Prospect → Qualify → Meeting → Demo → Proposal → Negotiation → Close
Those stages are useful, particularly inside a CRM. But they don't tell your people what needs to happen inside each stage.
What makes an opportunity genuinely qualified? What needs to be discovered before presenting a solution? Do we understand the commercial impact of the customer's problem? Do we know what outcome they want? Who else is involved in the decision? What could stop the deal? When should a proposal be sent? What has to happen before an opportunity progresses?
If those things aren't defined, two people can follow exactly the same CRM stages while conducting completely different sales conversations.
You don't just need stages. You need a standard for what happens within them.
SalesCraft™
A Commercial Standard for How Your Company Sells
SalesCraft™ is the methodology I use to help B2B companies create that standard.
It isn't a collection of scripts, and it isn't motivational sales training. The objective is to define and install a repeatable architecture for the sales conversation that your people can understand, use, practise and improve.
The SalesCraft™ process is built around five phases:
Research
Understand what is really happening inside the customer's business. Go beyond the surface request to uncover the problem, its impact, what needs to change, the desired outcome, the people involved and the factors that will influence the decision.
Adapt
Connect your solution to what actually matters to that customer. Rather than presenting every feature you offer, build value around the specific commercial outcomes the customer wants to achieve.
Finalise
Help the customer make a decision. Clarify concerns rather than immediately trying to overcome them, deal with the real objection and establish whether anything else is preventing the opportunity from moving forward.
Tie-Up
Remove ambiguity from what happens next. Define the action, the reason for it, who needs to be involved and when it will happen, rather than leaving opportunities sitting in the pipeline waiting for somebody to “follow up.”
Standardise the process. Not the personality.
Keep the individual style
The Goal Is Not to Make Everyone Sell the Same Way
Good salespeople have different personalities, strengths and communication styles. I don't want to remove that, and I don't believe your sales team should sound scripted.
The objective is to create consistency underneath those individual styles.
Your people can sound different while still qualifying opportunities to the same standard, conducting proper discovery, establishing value, identifying decision criteria, dealing with objections professionally and agreeing clear next steps.
Founder involvement
This Isn't About Removing the Founder From Sales
Not every founder wants to stop selling, and they shouldn't have to.
Some founders are excellent salespeople and genuinely enjoy being involved in customers and important opportunities. Others want to spend far less time in sales as the company grows.
SalesCraft™ isn't about forcing either model.
The objective is to make sure the company's sales performance doesn't depend on the founder stepping in.
The founder can still participate where they add the most value, but the underlying sales process should work whether or not they are personally involved in every opportunity.
Implementation
We Don't Just Teach the Sales Process. We Install It.
A workshop can introduce an idea. It rarely changes how a company sells on its own.
Installing a commercial standard means working with the real situations your business faces: live opportunities, discovery conversations, qualification, objections, proposals, follow-up and deals that have become stuck.
Depending on the business, implementation can include mentoring, role-play, live deal reviews, conversation analysis, qualification standards, objection handling, follow-up structure and management rhythm.
The objective is not for your people to know SalesCraft™.
The objective is for the standard to become how your company sells.
What can change
What Can Change When Sales Has a Standard Behind It?
The value of a professional sales process isn't the process itself. It is what happens when people begin applying the same commercial principles consistently.
Across companies and salespeople I've worked with, results have included:
$42M → $57M
A company recording its best sales year.
$3.5M → $4.5M
A business with a clearer standard behind its sales conversations.
$2M → $7M
One salesperson in seven months.
≈ $1M
A deal that had gone cold, reworked through the sales process and ultimately closed.
Every business is different, and past results are not a guarantee of future performance. But the principle is consistent: when the process becomes more professional, the company has something it can measure, coach and improve.
Who this is for
Who Is SalesCraft™ For?
My work is primarily with founders and CEOs of established B2B companies, typically in the $5M–$50M revenue range, where sales has become important enough that relying on instinct is beginning to create problems.
You may have a small sales team. The founder may still sell. You may have technical or operational people involved in important customer conversations. The exact structure isn't the deciding factor.
The common issue is that how the company sells hasn't yet become a clearly defined commercial standard.
If operations have procedures, finance has controls and delivery has standards, but sales still changes depending on who's having the conversation, that's the gap SalesCraft™ is designed to address.
A simple test
A Simple Way to Test Your Current Sales Process
Ask everyone involved in sales one question:
“Talk me through exactly how we take a potential customer from the first meaningful conversation to a closed deal.”
Listen to the answers.
If everyone describes roughly the same process, qualification criteria and decision points, you probably have a meaningful standard developing.
If you get completely different answers, you may have good people and a CRM, but you don't yet have one professional way of selling.
Why Joe Dalton?
30 Years Across Sales, Business and Technology
I've spent more than 30 years in sales across B2B services, industrial, engineering, SaaS, automotive and other complex sales environments in Europe and the United States.
I'm the creator of SalesCraft™, an author, TEDx speaker and Enterprise Ireland coach. My work isn't built around telling experienced people to “sell harder.” It's about helping companies put professional architecture around the sales conversations they're already having.
Start with the real constraint
If Sales Still Depends on Instinct, Let's Find Out Why
You don't need to know whether you have a sales process problem, a qualification problem, a messaging problem or a management problem before speaking with me.
That's the point of the first conversation.
We'll look at how sales currently works inside your business, where opportunities are breaking down and whether the issue is something SalesCraft™ can help you address.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions About B2B Sales Processes
What is a B2B sales process?
A B2B sales process is a defined and repeatable system for moving a potential business customer from the first meaningful conversation through qualification, evaluation, decision and follow-up. A strong B2B sales process defines not only the pipeline stages but what must be understood, communicated and agreed before an opportunity progresses.
What is a commercial sales standard?
A commercial sales standard defines how a company expects sales opportunities to be qualified, researched, progressed and concluded. It creates a shared framework so sales performance is less dependent on the individual style or instinct of a particular salesperson.
What's the difference between a sales process and a CRM?
A sales process defines how opportunities should be handled and progressed. A CRM records information about those opportunities and where they sit in the pipeline. The CRM should support the sales process rather than become the sales process.
Does a small B2B sales team need a formal sales process?
Yes. A formal process can become particularly valuable when more than one person is involved in selling because it creates common qualification criteria, conversation standards and progression rules. The purpose isn't to create bureaucracy; it is to reduce unnecessary variation.
Does SalesCraft™ replace the personality of the salesperson?
No. SalesCraft™ standardises the architecture underneath the sales conversation, not the salesperson's personality. People can retain their own communication style while working to the same professional commercial standard.
Does the founder have to stop selling?
No. Some founders want to remain involved in sales and others want to step back. The objective is not to remove the founder. It is to build a sales process that doesn't depend on the founder being personally involved in every important deal.