How sales works: process, pipeline and metrics

Sales is helping the right customers make a good decision, and making it easy for them to buy. The best salespeople are curious, organised and resilient, not pushy.

B2C vs B2B

• B2C (business to consumer): many customers, smaller deals, often a single decision-maker, shorter cycles (ed-tech counselling, insurance, retail, real estate).
• B2B (business to business): fewer, larger deals; several stakeholders (user, manager, finance, procurement); longer cycles (SaaS, recruitment services, logistics, manufacturing supplies).

Roles: SDR/BDR/BDE (find and qualify leads, book meetings), account executive (run the sales process and close), account manager (grow and retain existing customers), field sales (meet customers in person), inside sales (phone, email, video).

The sales process

1. Prospecting: find potential customers who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP).
2. Outreach: cold calls, emails, LinkedIn, referrals, events.
3. Qualification: are they a real opportunity? Need, budget, authority, timing.
4. Discovery: understand their situation, problems and goals deeply.
5. Solution / demo / proposal: show how you solve their problems.
6. Handling objections.
7. Negotiation and closing.
8. Onboarding and account growth: retention, upsell, cross-sell, referrals.

The pipeline and the maths

A pipeline is all open deals by stage. Healthy salespeople manage it like a scientist.

Example funnel: 200 calls → 50 conversations (25%) → 15 qualified meetings (30%) → 5 proposals (33%) → 2 deals closed (40%).

If your target is 4 deals a month, work backwards: you need about 400 calls, or better conversion at some stage. Knowing your numbers tells you exactly what to improve.

Key metrics

• Activity: calls, emails, meetings booked.
• Conversion rate by stage; win rate (won ÷ opportunities).
• Average deal size, sales cycle length.
• Pipeline coverage (pipeline value ÷ target; often 3× is the goal).
• Revenue vs quota; for account managers, retention, churn and expansion revenue.

Check yourself

• What does an SDR do differently from an account executive?
• Your target is 6 deals a month and your win rate from proposal is 40%. How many proposals do you need?
• Name three differences between B2B and B2C sales.