Sales process
Where Is Your B2B SaaS Sales Process Leaking?
Deals rarely stall because a salesperson missed one follow-up. They stall because something was never established earlier in the process, and the deal was moved forward anyway.
In practice, deals get stuck, slip or disappear for seven reasons: qualification was too weak, discovery was too shallow, urgency didn't really exist, value was never clear, stakeholders were missing, the buying process was unknown, or the next step contained no real buyer commitment.
A sales process isn't a list of CRM stages. It's a sequence of buyer decisions and commitments.
Written by Merel Roest, Founder & GTM Consultant at Blackbird GTM.
Your sales process probably isn't broken where you think
Most teams look for the leak at the end. Deals died in negotiation, so negotiation must be the problem. Almost always the deal was already unqualified, unowned or unurgent several stages earlier, and late-stage effort was spent compensating for that.
That's why closing training rarely fixes a leaking process. The decision the buyer never made in stage two is what surfaces as silence in stage five.
- Deals that die late usually failed early
- A positive conversation is not progress
- A stage that can be entered without the buyer doing anything cannot predict anything
The five most common leaks
Leaks cluster. Take your last twenty opportunities, mark where each one stopped, and you will normally find one dominant leak rather than five small ones.
1. Qualification
- Symptom
- Many opportunities, low conversion.
- What usually gets blamed
- Sales reps don't qualify well enough.
- What to investigate
- Which buyer commitments actually exist? What did the buyer do, not say, to earn opportunity status?
- What good looks like
- Every opportunity has a relevant problem, a quantified impact, real urgency, named stakeholders and a credible buying process.
2. Discovery
- Symptom
- Good first calls, then the deal goes quiet.
- What usually gets blamed
- The buyer went dark or lost interest.
- What to investigate
- Was the problem understood in the buyer's own words, including its cost and the consequence of doing nothing? Or did the call turn into a product walkthrough?
- What good looks like
- The buyer can articulate the problem, its impact and why now, and you can repeat it back in their language without your product in the sentence.
3. Value
- Symptom
- Deals stall on price, or on "we'll pick this up next quarter".
- What usually gets blamed
- The pricing is too high or the market is slow.
- What to investigate
- Is the value tied to a business outcome the buyer already cares about, or only to features? Who inside is worse off if nothing changes?
- What good looks like
- The buyer can explain internally what improves, by how much, and what the cost of waiting is.
4. Deal progression
- Symptom
- Deals move stages but never move dates.
- What usually gets blamed
- The CRM hygiene is bad.
- What to investigate
- Does every open opportunity have a next step that requires the buyer to act, with a date they agreed to? Or only a task the salesperson set for themselves?
- What good looks like
- Progress is visible as buyer actions: an internal meeting arranged, a stakeholder introduced, a security review started, a budget conversation held.
5. Buying process and closing
- Symptom
- Deals slip repeatedly at the end, or new stakeholders appear late.
- What usually gets blamed
- Procurement, legal or bad luck.
- What to investigate
- Who decides, who signs, which internal checks are mandatory, and in what order? Was that mapped with the buyer or assumed?
- What good looks like
- The buying process is documented with names, steps and dates before a proposal is sent, so closing is a formality rather than a negotiation about who needs to be involved.
A sales stage is not a sales activity
A sales stage should describe what has become true for the buyer, not what the salesperson has done. This is the single change that makes a pipeline forecastable, because it makes stage definitions falsifiable.
Activity-based stage
- Demo completed
- Proposal sent
- Negotiation
Buyer-based stage
- Problem and impact confirmed by the buyer
- Commercial solution aligned and buying process confirmed
- Decision criteria understood, stakeholders aligned and next step agreed with a date
If a stage can be reached by sending an email, it tells you nothing about revenue.
How do you recognise a deal that's stalling?
Stalling deals look healthy from the outside. The signals are almost always about who is doing the work.
- The salesperson is the only one taking action between conversations
- The next step is a follow-up rather than a buyer commitment
- The problem is described in your words, not the buyer's
- Nobody outside the original contact has been involved
- The date has moved twice without anything changing in the buyer's situation
- Nobody can say what would have to happen for the deal to be lost
When these signals appear across many deals at once, the issue is broader: why your pipeline isn't predictable.
What makes a good sales process different
A scalable sales process isn't longer or more documented. It's more explicit about what has to be true, so two different people manage the same deal the same way.
- Entry criteria per stage, defined as buyer facts rather than seller activity
- Exit criteria, including when a deal is officially dead
- One shared qualification standard, applied identically by everyone
- A next step in every open deal, owned by the buyer, with a date
- A mapped buying process before a commercial proposal exists
- Reviews that ask what changed for the buyer, not what the rep did
CRM process versus actual buying process
Most CRMs track what the sales team did. The buying process is what determines whether revenue arrives. When those two drift apart, the forecast is a record of activity.
CRM process
- Stages named after seller actions
- Deals move when something is sent
- Contact fields filled, roles unclear
- Close date set by the rep's optimism
- Activity counted as momentum
Actual buying process
- Stages named after buyer decisions
- Deals move when the buyer commits
- Decision makers, influencers and blockers named
- Close date derived from the buyer's internal steps
- Commitments counted as momentum
Your CRM should represent the buying process, not just the activities of the salesperson. If it can't, the pipeline cannot be managed, only reported.
The Sales Process Leak Test
Take any open opportunity and ask these five questions about the stage it currently sits in.
- 01What needs to be true for this deal to be in this stage?
- 02What changed for the buyer to get it here?
- 03What commitment has the buyer made?
- 04What is the next buyer action, and on what date?
- 05Why could this deal stop here?
If a salesperson can't answer these, the stage isn't wrong in the CRM, it's simply not predictive. Run the test across ten deals and the leak locates itself.
How Blackbird GTM approaches it
The work is diagnostic first. We don't rebuild the process before knowing where it actually leaks.
01Review the last twenty deals
Won, lost and stalled, to find where progression consistently breaks and what was missing at that point.
02Test the stage definitions
Each stage is rewritten as a buyer fact with entry and exit criteria, so it can be verified rather than argued about.
03Rebuild qualification and discovery
One standard for problem, impact, urgency, stakeholders and buying process, in language your team already uses.
04Map the buying process
Decision makers, internal checks and sequence, captured in the CRM so the forecast follows the buyer.
05Install the review rhythm
Deal reviews built around what changed for the buyer, which is what keeps the process from decaying back into activity tracking.
The Blackbird GTM view
Most sales process projects fail because they produce documentation instead of decisions. Fewer stages with sharper criteria beat a detailed playbook nobody applies.
A process is repeatable when a new salesperson reaches the same conclusion about a deal as the founder would. That's the standard, not adoption of a template.
About the author
Merel Roest
Founder & GTM Consultant, Blackbird GTM
Merel Roest has led B2B SaaS sales as Head of Sales, built and ran a €1.7M direct sales pipeline, grew ARR by 40% and increased average contract duration by 66%. She works with founders and commercial leaders on ICP, messaging, sales process, qualification and commercial organisation.
Where to look next
- Once the leaks are visible, the next question is what actually makes a pipeline predictable.
- Qualification only works on top of a sharp ICP, which is what the ICP stress test is for.
- If deals only progress when the founder joins, read founder-led sales without founder dependency.
- A defined process is also the precondition for whether you're ready for a sales hire.
Where is your sales process leaking?
Blackbird GTM helps B2B SaaS companies identify where deals are getting stuck and which parts of the commercial process need fixing first.