The sales process you know is a lie. Or perhaps it is just a comforting illusion leaders tell themselves to sleep better at night. Here is the reality of the trade.
Everyone wants to believe in the linear progression of a sale. It is neat. It is tidy. You put a lead in the top, you turn the crank, and money falls out the bottom. This is the industrialization of human relationships, and it is the primary reason your revenue is leaking.
We treat sales as a science when it is actually a study in entropy.
Systems naturally move from order to disorder. A deal is a system. It starts with high energy and potential order, but as time passes, chaos ensues. A champion leaves. A budget gets slashed. A competitor with a lower moral baseline promises the moon. The pipeline becomes a place of false data.
The “5-Step Sales Process” you see on LinkedIn or in expensive masterclasses is usually a retrospective hallucination. It is how people wish things happened.
Sales is not about what ought to happen but what is happening with your prospects in real-time. And that requires embracing the mess. You have to understand that you are not managing a process. You are managing human anxiety, internal politics, and the relentless pull of organizational chaos.
Step 1: Discovery (The Signal in the Noise)
Most discovery calls are interrogations. They are thin veils for a salesperson to check boxes on a BANT framework (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing).
- Do you have money?
- Can you sign the check?
- Does it hurt enough?
- When can we close?
This is not discovery. This is a filtering mechanism for the desperate.
True discovery is the act of finding the signal amidst the noise of the market. Your buyers are inundated with information. They are drowning in “slop” produced by AI content farms and aggressive marketing teams. They do not need you to ask them what keeps them up at night. They know what keeps them up. They need you to tell them why they are awake.
You must look for the “context” behind the pain.
In our work, we often find that the stated problem is rarely the actual problem. A prospect might say they need a new CRM because the old one is “clunky.” A lazy salesperson hears “feature request.” A strategic salesperson hears “political tension.”
Why is it clunky? Who implemented it? Was it the current VP of Sales? If so, criticizing the CRM is criticizing the VP. That is a landmine.
Discovery is the process of mapping the invisible lines of power and influence within the buying committee. You are looking for the dark social channels where they actually talk to their peers. You are trying to understand if the person you are talking to has the political capital to push a deal through or if they are just a “champion” with no armor.
This step is not about finding a fit. It is about finding the truth. And often, the truth is that they are not ready for you.
Step 2: Qualification (The Trust Audit)
If discovery is finding the signal, qualification is testing the connection.
Standard sales training tells you to qualify the buyer. Can they afford us? Are they the right size?
This is backward.
In a market defined by skepticism, where trust is at an all-time low, the buyer is qualifying you. They are running a constant, subconscious audit on your integrity. They have been burned before. They have bought the “AI-powered” solution that turned out to be a wrapper for a basic script. They have signed contracts with vendors who promised white-glove service and delivered an automated helpdesk.
The fear of loss dominates the B2B landscape.
Therefore, qualification is actually a “Trust Audit.” You must prove you are not a risk.
We often talk about the “fake pipeline problem”. This exists because salespeople fill their CRMs with “qualified” leads who have no intention of buying. These leads are polite. They take the meeting. They nod at the demo. But they do not trust you.
To fix this, you must disqualify ruthlessly.
You must be the one to say, “I do not think we are the right fit for you right now.” This radical honesty is the only way to pierce the armor of a cynical buyer. It signals that you are not hungry for their commission. You are interested in their success.
When you refuse to sell to someone who will fail with your product, you gain the “moral authority” in the conversation. And in high-ticket sales, moral authority is the only currency that matters.
Ask yourself: Are we entering a revenue partnership, or am I just trying to hit a quota?. If it is the latter, the deal is already dead. It just hasn’t stopped moving yet.
Step 3: The Pitch (The Narrative Construction)
We have arrived at the part everyone loves. The pitch. The deck. The demo.
Most pitches are boring. They are lists of features masquerading as value propositions. They talk about “efficiency” and “ROI” and “synergy.” These are words that have lost all meaning through overuse. They are the background radiation of the corporate world.
A great pitch is not a presentation. It is a narrative construction.
The role of the seller (and the marketer) is to be a storyteller. But you are not telling your story. You are retelling their story with a better ending.
You must frame the narrative around “entropy.”
Show them their current world. Show them how their systems are degrading. Humans are loss-averse. And fight much harder to keep what works than to gain something new.
Your product is not the hero of this story. The product is merely the tool the hero (the buyer) uses to defeat the monster (chaos/inefficiency/risk).
Consider the “Simian Army” approach used by Netflix. They intentionally broke things to see where the weaknesses were. In your pitch, you must intellectually “break” their current process. Show them the vulnerabilities they have ignored. Show them the vendor risk in their supply chain.
“What happens if this vendor fails? What happens to your CAC then?”.
Don’t confuse this with mere fear-mongering, you are gifting them strategic clarity. You are giving them the “good taste” and intuition they lack.
Do not sell the solution. Sell the absence of the problem.
Step 4: Negotiation (The Supply Chain Defense)
You have the “yes.” The champion is on board. The decision-maker is nodding.
Now the real work begins.
Amateurs think negotiation is about price. Professionals know negotiation is about the “digital supply chain”.
The deal does not die because you wouldn’t drop the price by 10%. The deal dies because Legal sends a redline regarding your SOC 2 compliance. It dies because Procurement flags a vendor in your sub-processor list. It dies because the implementation timeline clashes with their internal code freeze.
This is the “Business That Leaks”.
You are not negotiating with a person anymore. You are negotiating with the immune system of a large organization. This immune system is designed to reject foreign bodies. You are a foreign body.
To survive this step, you must stop being a salesperson and start being a project manager. You need to anticipate the SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) requests. You need to have your security audits ready. You need to understand their internal procurement cycles better than they do.
We see so many deals stall here. The “fake pipeline” balloons because deals get stuck in legal limbo for six months.
Your job in this phase is to remove friction. Every day a deal sits in legal is a day entropy can set in. A new executive joins. A budget freeze is announced. A competitor launches a new feature. Time is the enemy of the deal.
Do not wait for them to ask for the compliance documents. Send them before they ask. Do not wait for the redlines. Ask for their standard contract template during the Discovery phase.
Control the supply chain of the deal, or it will strangle you.
Step 5: The Close (The Beginning of the Loop)
The bell rings. The contract is signed. The sales team goes to the bar.
This is the single biggest failure point in modern business.
We treat the “Close” as the end of the process. In reality, it is just the shifting of the burden. You have taken the money; now you have to deliver the promise.
If marketing and sales have done their job, they have made a promise to the market. The product must now keep that promise. This is where the “Trust Gap” usually opens up.
The buyer has “Buyer’s Remorse” before the ink is even dry. They are wondering if they made a mistake. They are wondering if they will look like a fool to the board.
The true “Close” is not the signature. It is the first moment of value realization.
This is where the concept of “Revenue Partnership” comes into play. You are not a vendor anymore. You are a co-strategist.
You should be using your data to provide them with predictive insights about their market. You should be telling them what is coming next, not just fixing their bugs.
If you treat the Close as the finish line, you are building a churn factory. You are filling a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
The sales process is a loop. The way you close this customer determines how easy it will be to close the next one. Word of mouth is the only marketing channel that cannot be blocked by an algorithm.
The Organizational Reality
This five-step process is difficult. It requires high empathy, high intellect, and a tolerance for ambiguity.
Most organizations are not built for this.
They are built for volume. They want SDRs making 100 calls a day. They want “more activity.” They want “more volume”. They use AI to churn out generic outreach that erodes trust faster than it builds pipeline.
Leaders focus on the management problem—how to manage resources—rather than the reality of the market. They are disconnected from the ground truth.
If you are a salesperson, you must fight the urge to comply with these empty metrics. You must build a process that respects the humanity of the buyer.
If you are a leader, you must stop treating your people like resources to be managed and start treating them like the strategic assets they are. You must look at your pipeline and ask: “How much of this is real? And how much is just platitudes?”
The future of sales belongs to those who can navigate complexity without losing their soul. It belongs to the curators of trust.
The rest will be replaced by agents. And honestly? They probably should be.
