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Customers steer the buying process – sales accompanies it. This playbook translates the white paper “From Lead to Deal” into 24 practical slides: the six stages from lead to close, the 7-step process, SPIN Selling and the Challenger Sale compared (plus MEDDIC and the Golden Circle), the six steps of an effective sales conversation and the right talk ratio. Plus the five biggest levers, typical pitfalls from more than 25 optimised sales organisations, leadership as the success factor and a 90-day roadmap.
At a glance
– Buyers are 70% of the way through the buying journey before they first get in touch.1 In a complex B2B purchase, typically 6–10 people have a say.2
– Listening wins: according to Gong Labs, talk share is 57% in won deals and 62% in lost ones.3 Above 65%, close rates drop.3
– Won deals get by with 15–16 questions per call. At around 20, a conversation tips into interrogation – that's what lost deals look like.
– Sellers spend just 28% of their working time actually selling.4 The playbook names the fixes: consolidate tools, automate admin, use AI.
– Coaching is the exception: only 26% of sellers get one-to-one coaching at least weekly, and only 11.3% of companies coach “dynamically” with a process and CRM.45
– The practitioner's view with Johannes Zimmer shows what a system can do: at Viewento, sales calls rose by 74% and the close rate by 40%.6
The playbook is the working version of the whitepaper: less background, more hands-on moves. Each of the five levers comes with what to do about it – from a response SLA with routing and instant meeting booking to exit criteria, weekly stage tracking and a why-first SPIN call guide with call reviews. The eight most common pitfalls, such as “a pipeline full of hope” or no committed next step, each come with a concrete fix, from a mutual action plan to a stakeholder map.
Four parts take you through it:
01 The sales process – six stages mapped to the customer's buying jobs
02 Three models compared – key question, seller's role, strength, limitation and best use at a glance
03 The sales conversation – six steps, talk share and a view from the field
04 Execution & success factor – levers, pitfalls, the competence house, leadership and the 90-day roadmap
In daily use: the leadership operating system
Built for heads of sales and managing directors who want to work on the process with their team. The pitfalls double as a checklist for your next pipeline review: where is a shared MQL/SQL definition missing, where does everything hinge on a single contact in the buying group? The side-by-side comparison of the models helps you decide which approach suits what you sell.
Day to day, everything runs on the leadership operating system: daily focus on the most important deals, weekly pipeline, forecast and call reviews plus one-to-one coaching, monthly conversion and win/loss analysis per stage. If you want the studies and background behind it, you'll find them in the whitepaper “From Lead to Deal”. And if you want to know where your sales team stands, a free initial call walks through your process from lead to deal with you.
