How to build a modular sales process

This one is for the nerds like me.

I fell in love with sales, not because I like talking to people (I’m mostly introverted, so I don’t). It’s because I like the mechanics of it.

When I first started my career in Marketing, I realized that 99/100 times, whatever you do barely moves the needle for your sales team. The most random stuff will perform. The most boring stuff will be consistent but fairly flat. And it usually takes a while, and a lot of creativity, to get really good at it.

I’m a logical thinker. I like systems. So I found that in sales, everything can be isolated pretty easily. And if you fix a component, you see immediate results.

I really got to put this in practice when I was VP Sales at Proposify. When I started there, the best AEs were closing an average deal size of $1800. Took over 60 days to close, with a 15% win rate.

I started breaking down the component:

• What meetings are we running?

• How are we structuring those meetings?

• How are we starting those meetings?

• How are we doing our discovery?

• How are we doing our pitch/story?

• How are we doing our demos?

• How are we doing our follow-ups?

• How are we handling objections?

• How are we booking next steps?

I started analyzing all of our calls and reviewing emails sent.

And then I started chipping away at it. We started with what would have the biggest impact - implementing a discovery framework.

In 4 months, we had gone from:

• 15% win rate → 27% win rate

• $1800 ACV → $3600 ACV

• 60+ days cycle → 40 days cycle

So very quickly, I knew this approach was working. We started seeing progress immediately on calls and email follow-ups. And very shortly after, we started winning the biggest deals in company history.

I started at Proposify in January 2019, ended in September 2021. During that whole time, we systematically made the sales process better every month.

We would pick a component, break it down into parts. Then focus training and coaching on specific parts that would have the biggest impact on our revenue. Every month, the sales team went through this. Every month, the sales team got better.

Breaking down everything into components lets you isolate an area that you can get better at, then quantify the results.

This is why I love sales so much. It’s not the interactions, it’s the systems, mechanics, and components that connect. And can be adjusted, monitored, and improved on.

This is how the sales process transformed at Proposify while I was there:

From start (Jan 2019) to end (Sept 2021):

• 15% win rate → 42% win rate

• $1800 ACV → $13k ACV

• 60+ days cycle → 22 days cycle

It took a steady amount of iteration, but the numbers kept getting better and better.

In this newsletter, I will break down the different components of a selling system. Then give examples of how you put them together to build your own sales process.

You’ll see that it’s pretty malleable. The frameworks can run across many different types of sales motions (SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise, etc). You just need to piece them together for your startup and what makes sense for your buyers.

This is going to be a nerdy one. Let’s go!

P.S. If you know any founders who are struggling with building their sales process, forward them this email. It’s going to be a comprehensive guide for them.

Table of Contents

• The Main Components of Sales

  • Positioning Framework

  • Sales Story

  • Pain-Based Discovery Framework

  • Demo Framework

  • Meeting Framework

  • Follow-up Framework

• How to Build a Sales Process From Scratch

  • Using Positioning and FOUNDER for Outreach

  • Using Meeting Framework + Discovery Framework + St …

  • Using Discovery Framework + Kickoff + Follow-up Fr …

• Connecting the frameworks into a sales cycle

The Main Components of Sales

Often when I first work with founders, they think sales is all about running a demo call. It really isn’t.

There are specific components that are always at play. And connecting them together is what really creates the sales process.

Here are the main components that you’ll need:

• Positioning Framework

• Sales Story Framework

• Pain-Based Discovery Framework (like FOUNDER or SPICED)

• Demo Framework

• Meeting Framework

• Follow-up Framework

Let’s dig into these, then I’ll get into specific examples of how they work together, and will end with an end-to-end sales process, broken down in components.

Positioning Framework

Everything starts with positioning. You won’t learn this in traditional sales training because it’s usually geared towards sales teams. And positioning is usually considered a marketing function.

But in early-stage startups where you’re doing founder-led sales, it’s mission critical to your sales process.

Positioning is about highlighting how you’re different than the alternatives (not better). And how that differentiation creates value (what pain it solves). And who really really cares about that pain (the ICP who has the characteristics of pain).

This trickles into your targeting, messaging, outreach, demo, questioning, sales story, pricing, proposals, follow-ups, etc.

Don’t skip this - it’s not a big company exercise. It’s the difference between you being seen vs not.

Here’s a detailed newsletter I wrote on how to do positioning.

Sales Story

The sales story framework helps you articulate your point of you, and explain why your differentiators matter, in what context.

Most folks I’ve seen go through a boring pitch about company history and what the product does. Nobody cares about that.

They want to know that you understand their problem, and want to understand why they haven’t been able to fix it yet.

You sales story goes like this:

• Polarizing insight

• Market alternatives

• Problem/gap in the market - why it hasn’t been solved by the alternatives

• The ideal world

• Your solution (which is usually a light demo)

You can learn how to put a sales story together in this newsletter.

Pain-Based Discovery Framework

Learning how to do discovery well is the single most important thing to learn in sales.

Most folks ask what I’d call qualification questions - how big is your team, how many websites do you need to crawl, what tools are you using, etc.

That is a tiny little component of discovery. Unless they’re coming to you ready to buy and only need to figure out which plan to be on, you need to do a lot more than this.

This is where pain-based discovery comes in.

90% of deals close because there’s a painful problem that’s costing a lot of money for a company.

So this is where you need to spend your time to better understand why they’re making a change.

I use FOUNDER for this. If you’re not familiar with FOUNDER, you can buy the ebook here (30% off with coupon 30OFFMAIL). I would also recommend SPICED from Jacco Van der Kooij of Winning by Design.

A discovery framework helps you classify information as you receive it.

Here are the components of FOUNDER:

• Facts

• Objectives and Pain

• Uncovering Impact

• Negative Consequences

• Driving Events

• Reaching a Decision

Discovery happens on every call, and even in follow-ups. It powers the entire sales process. You can’t avoid it if you’re going to do sales.

You can learn more about how to do good discovery here.

Demo Framework

You can’t show everything in a demo. Realistically, you have less than 9 minutes of screenshare time in a 60-minute call before someone tunes out.

So you have to be very precise about what you show. And how you show it.

If you’re showing features, or trying to train someone on how to use your software, you will miss the mark.

For demos to work, they need to be designed in chapters. Each chapter presents a single use case, workflow, or pain that you solve.

The formula is Context>Problem>Capabilities>Show>Ask.

You explain the context in which the workflow is relevant (usually their current state of doing things). You explain why current state is problematic. You tell them what capabilities they’ll gain with the new workflow. You show a handful of features that explain the new workflow. Then you end with a conversation-provoking question that forces them to imagine using the software (e.g. “how does this compare to keeping track of sales onboarding in spreadsheets?”)

To learn more about how to demo well, you can read this newsletter.

Meeting Framework

How you start and end meetings matters a lot if you want to keep the deal moving forward.

What happens in the middle of the meeting is usually a handful of frameworks coming together for a specific meeting type (like a discovery call or demo call).

But the start and end are always the same, and are required in order to stitch meetings together.

Every meeting has 5 components:

• The Start (relevant bonding and rapport)

• The Kickoff (setting the structure for the meeting)

• Info Gathering (discovery)

• Info Sharing (usually sales story or demo)

• Next Steps (establishing the kickoff for the next meeting)

The Kickoff is the most important thing to nail down in a meeting structure. It’s also the easiest thing to implement in your sales process now that will have the biggest impact moving forward.

• Time check (e.g. are we still good for 60 minutes?)

• People check (e.g. is anyone else joining the call?)

• Purpose (e.g. the purpose of the call today is to get a better understanding of your sales process and see whether or not we could help.)

• Ideal outcome (e.g. What’s your ideal outcome for the call today?)

• Permission to discuss next steps (e.g. If we decide it’s a fit, can we spend 10 minutes at the end discussing next steps, which is usually a team demo?)

You can read this newsletter to learn more about how to start your sales calls.

Follow-up Framework

Most deals are won in follow-ups. You have a meeting, you send the right follow-up. Run the next meeting, send the right follow-up.

Prospects immediately forget 90% of what you discussed in a sales call. So unless you summarize the key points and send it promptly, and hold them accountable to doing what they said they would do, you likely won’t close many deals.

A good follow-up does a few things:

• Shows gratitude to the prospect.

• Summarizes the Facts, Objectives and Pains, and Uncovering Impact parts of your sales discovery.

• Uses Negative Consequences and Driving Events to establish urgency.

• Outlines next steps from what you learned in Reaching a Decision.

• Let’s them know when you’ll reach back out if you don’t hear from them, or when the next schedule meeting is.

The summary email should be written as if you’re sending it to folks at the prospect’s company that weren’t on the call. Make it easy for your champion to forward it around.

More details on how to properly follow up (with templates) here.

How to Build a Sales Process From Scratch

Now here comes the fun part.

A lot of folks, when they hear the term “sales process,” the immediately think of something scripted, robotic, and rigid.

But here’s a fun fact - it’s not, if you stitch together frameworks.

They key is to have a handful of frameworks that you deploy for key parts of your sales cycle. And once you know the frameworks and how to operate within them, you get a lot of flexibility in how you can run this.

And the beauty from all this is that you have structure. You’re not winging it.

So it’s really the best way to build a sales process - lots of flexibility with the right amount of structure so it feels natural.

Let’s start coming up with examples of stitching frameworks together to build your sales process.

Using Positioning and FOUNDER for Outreach

So with your positioning, you’re able to get to your target audience. And develop basic messaging. And your messaging should flow into the Facts, Objectives and Pain, and Uncovering Impact parts of FOUNDER.

And once you’ve narrowed your positioning into your ICP, the messaging ends up writing itself.

Using Meeting Framework + Discovery Framework + Story Framework for an intro call

You can use the different components to design how a meeting should run as well.

Here’s an example of how an intro call would flow:

• The Start

• The Kickoff

• Facts

• Objectives and Pain

• Summary

• Uncovering Impact

• Negative Consequences

• Driving Events

• Summary

• Sales Story

• Reaching a Decision

• Next Steps (Planning the kickoff for the next meeting)

Using Meeting Framework + Discovery Framework + Story Framework + Demo Framework for an demo call

Here’s an example of how you’d use the frameworks to run a demo call.

• The Start

• The Kickoff

• Summarize FOUNDER from previous call

• Continue discovery with more FOUNDER

• Sales Story

• Demo Framework

• Reaching a Decision discovery

• Next steps (setting up the Kickoff for the next call)

You could combine the frameworks and meeting structures to do an intro/demo call as well by extracting the demo framework and injecting it into the intro call flow:

Using Discovery Framework + Kickoff + Follow-up Framework to send an email summary

When you run your calls using FOUNDER, and bookend your calls with a Kickoff, then the summary email writes itself. Here’s an example:

Connecting the frameworks into a sales cycle

Once you understand the different frameworks and how to break them down into components, you can start building your Lego house.

Every sales motion runs differently. SMB cycles are usually shorter with less calls. Mid-market and enterprise are usually longer with more calls, and sometimes even POCs (proof of concept). You might have a managed trial as part of your cycle as well.

It really doesn’t matter what kinds of calls you end up with, the frameworks are the same. Just how and when you use them changes.

The formula is always the same:

• Kickoff meeting 1

• FOUNDER discovery

• Info sharing (sales story, demo, etc)

• FOUNDER discovery

• Set-up Kickoff for meeting 2

• Email summary with FOUNDER notes and Kickoff of meeting 2

Repeat this for each meeting that’s required.

This is really why I nerd out about sales. Because once you understand the frameworks and components, the fun really starts.

You can track the email summaries you send and whether or not folks are ghosting you. Then you can tweak how you send summary emails.

You can go into your call recordings and break down the components of your email. Are you doing the Kickoff? Are you using FOUNDER for discovery? Are you applying the sales story and demo framework? Are you completing the R of FOUNDER at the end of the call? Are you setting up the kickoff for the next call?

You can essentially coach yourself to become better at sales once you have this knowledge. Which is very powerful.

I’d love to hear from you! Hit reply and let me know what other topics you’d like to learn about.

For more practical early-stage sales tips, connect with me on LinkedIn.

Buy the FOUNDER Operating System ebook here (special discount code 30OFFMAIL to get 30% off)

If you’re looking for more hands-on help implementing your first sales process, reach out for coaching packages.