Sales: Workflows
How an opportunity moves from profile match to signature, and the handoffs with Marketing, Delivery, Finance, Legal and Customer Success.
Markdown. No sign-up, no email.
What arrives#
| From | What | Becomes |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing | Inbound interest, content engagement | A warm candidate, which converts far better than a cold one |
| The profile | Matched companies | Cold candidates, scored |
| Customer Success | Expansion signals in existing accounts | The cheapest pipeline available and the most often ignored |
| Delivery | What we can actually do, now | The constraint every proposal is checked against |
| Finance | Pricing and discount authority | The band inside which a seller can move |
Expansion signals from existing customers are the cheapest pipeline in the company and are routinely neglected in favour of new logos, which are more exciting and several times more expensive.
What leaves#
| To | What |
|---|---|
| Delivery and PMO | A won deal, with the scope as actually sold and the commitments made verbally |
| Finance | Forecast, and signed value |
| Legal | Anything non-standard, before signature |
| Marketing | Loss reasons and objections, which are the best content brief available |
| Customer Success | The handover: what was promised, by whom, and what the customer believes |
The handover row is where deals turn into problems. A customer who was told something in a meeting that never reached delivery becomes an unhappy customer at the exact moment they should be a reference.
The path#
Handoff contracts#
With Marketing. Marketing generates interest; sales converts it. The useful exchange runs the other way too: every objection heard in a call is a content brief, and objections are the highest quality content input available because they are what people actually ask.
With Delivery. Nothing is proposed that delivery has not confirmed it can do. This is the contract most often broken under quarter-end pressure and the one whose breach is most expensive, because the cost lands months later on people who did not make the promise.
With Finance. They set the discount band. Inside it, the seller decides; outside it, the CFO does. Sellers need to know where the line is without asking each time.
To Customer Success. A structured handover, including anything promised verbally. If it was said in a meeting, it was promised.
Cadence#
| Daily | New scored candidates, replies |
| Weekly | Pipeline quality, stalled deals, deals with no decision maker |
| Monthly | Score calibration, loss analysis, conversion |
| Quarterly | Profile review, and whether the anti-profile is being honoured |
The failure this design is built against#
A pipeline full of cheaply-generated leads that nobody can close, sold to by automated messages that damage the brand, on proposals that promise what delivery cannot build.
Every element here is a brake on that: a written anti-profile, scoring with a calibration check, a person on every first contact, and three checks before a proposal leaves. The common thread is that generation got cheap and consequence did not.