Reflection on revamping our sales process

Over the last month or so I've been working on updating our sales process. The trigger for this was merging two different sales teams into a single unified team. In this merge I went over our process, our CRM setup and how we were measuring success. Some of that might be useful to you if you're also working in, or adjacent to sales.

I've done my best here to abstract away any particulars related to our team or our tools. Both because I hope none of this is specific only to us and because some of the finer details are not really suitable to be distributed in a blog post. I have however, added a very high level overview of how we're setup if its useful for context. Additionally, nothing here is about "how to be a sales person," there are plenty of resources about that elsewhere.

Observations

Keep your pipelines as simple as you can

When I started this process we had six pipelines in our CRM, we now just have the one. We were using pipelines to segment customers which, while not an unreasonable plan, led to six different setups that were very hard to compare.

In reality we weren't selling in six different ways. Our from from lead through to meeting, trial and close were similar for each. Some took longer and they had different close rates but that isn't a good reason to split them up.

If you have more than one process to track it can make sense to have more than one pipeline. For example, if you have a team looking to book meetings you might have a pipeline where 'won' means a meeting has been booked and another for the 'sale'. In that case you don't want to combine your win rate across closing a deal and booking a meeting.

Similarly I've seen (and created) pipelines with far too many stages. As a rule of thumb I'd say you want to add a stage when some meaningful action has happened or a new person needs to get involved. That might be 'first meeting completed' signalling that the customer is interested or 'on-boarding ready' which might help customer success manage their workload.

An empty CRM is a useless CRM

You should aim to capture a lot of raw, unstructured data associated with deals if you can. This can be transcripts, activity on your product or anything else you can find. AI has become quite good at going through large amounts of (text) data and summarizing things. Having that data available for a deal and across multiple deals can help with closing deals and team training.

On the flip side of that, be cautious about adding too many structured fields to your deals. It can be tempting to want to store every little bit of information in a custom field but you'll quickly find that unless its automatic it will likely be a pain to maintain.

Other than the basics around contact information the most important structured fields you can capture are estimated deal size and estimated close date. Consider making these mandatory pretty early in the life of your deal. It is going to be hard to project revenue without them and without a revenue projection it's impossible to know if what you are working on right now is enough to hit your targets.

Deal probability is another useful field but in most cases I'd recommend tying that to the deal stage rather than trying to guess deal by deal how likely it is to close.

Remember that all the fields and automation in the world aren't going to offset nobody using the CRM. While you can certainly try and enforce use, you should also be working to make that as easy as possible.

The easier it is for sales people to keep their deals up to date the more likely it will be to happen. Use enforced fields where it matters but be willing to justify it. For example, an enforced 'Lost Reason' from a list is probably helpful and simple, on the other hand getting people to look for trends across their lost deals is better left to automation than people.

Your tools are not your process

It is easy to spend a lot of time refining how your tools are setup. This is true for big complicated tech stacks and people running sales out of a spreadsheet. Remember that the tools are there to be a snapshot of your process, not the process itself. All the hard work happens outside the CRM.

In the same vein, remember that the rituals around your process are just as important as the tools you have setup. For us that's a weekly "Pipe Review" and a monthly "Win Loss" meeting. Neither are complicated but they set the cadence for the team.

Your revenue forecasts are always going to be estimates

Even if you get all your deals up to date with size and close date, your figures are likely still just forecasts. When the dollars hit your bank account depends on many factors beyond the 'sales' process. Don't try and account for this, accept that your figures are estimates.

Here are a bunch of ways your actual revenue might differ from what you had in your CRM:

• You estimated some usage based figures, real world usage differed.
• You bill in different currencies, the rate of exchange changes.
• Customers renegotiate payment terms changing when the revenue arrives.
• The customer churns so you don't earn all the money you were set to earn.

If you're managing a team and many deals try and manage the cohort and the forecast as a whole rather than getting too specific on any given deal. Refine as well as you can but always build in some buffers in case your estimates are wrong.

Process is not a one shot activity

Treat all of your processes like a garden. You need to tend them to keep them useful. If you keep on top of this you will largely remove the need for a big refresh but those may still happen if there's a structural change to your process or team.

Our Setup

This is the current tool and team setup at Explorate as at Feb 2026. It is really only here to give context around our size and complexity as it related to the lessons above.

The Team Structure

• Growth Marketing + Lifecycle Marketing
  • Responsible for finding and nurturing leads. Our leads come from a roughly equal split of inbound, outbound and account based marketing. That's equal in lead count, the effort split is probably highest in ABM.
• Account Executives
  • We have several dedicated sales people at various levels of seniority. We also have two founders and a small handful of other commercial folk who spend a portion of their time on sales.
• Customer Success
  • For us CS is responsible for the first three months with us. We picked that range based on retention numbers, knowing that customers who had a good first quarter tended to stick around.
• Tried SDR, wasn't a fit for us.
  • I think if we double our AE numbers this will make sense again but we found that early qualification and booking meetings wasn't our bottleneck.
• Tried PLG, wasn't a fit for us.
  • We offer a SaaS tool and logistics services. One of those is suitable for PLG (SaaS) but we found that our ideal customers needed sales conversations early. This one will depend heavily on your average contract size.

The "Stack"

• Pipedrive
  • Pipedrive is simple. That works for and against it. We were using Salesforce at one stage but not to an extent that justified the price. As far as CRMs go it's fine.
• Aircall
  • Used for some outbound and inbound calls as a way to capture transcripts. Mixed feelings about the quality but it gets the job done.
• Gemini + ChatGPT + Make
  • We use a whole bunch of AI workflows to do things like enrichment, ICP fit checks, recent new summary etc. We tried a couple off the shelf tools too but found that self built worked well for what we need right now. The specifics here change a lot.
• Firmable
  • We use Firmable for finding contact details. It works fairly well. We've tried others in the past and they all seem pretty similar with their own quirks.
• Posthog
  • Our product is wired up to posthog for analytics. Certain events in app trigger changes in the CRM. Nothing too fancy here. We're working on more detailed product based lead scoring but it is very much a work in progress.
• Zapier
  • We use Zapier to glue things together. Nothing unexpected or fancy here except to say that lots of tools work well with Zapier and it can do a lot of the heavy lifting if your tools don't "officially" integrate.
• Google Meet + Transcripts
  • If we are booking online calls we use meet with Gemini turned on by default. This lets us capture transcripts which we use both internally for training and to generate meeting summaries for clients.