Offerings · Strategy · Cross-Functionally Aligned GTM Process
One process your whole go-to-market team runs, with stage exits your buyer confirmed, so the forecast becomes a readout instead of a negotiation.
I run your leadership team through building one sales process document, stage by stage, where every stage exit is something your buyer confirmed.
The longer version of thatClose
A stage-by-stage document that says what has to be true in your buyer's organization before a deal moves, who does what to get it there, and what that stage is worth in the roll up.
What it is
It is a facilitated build of one document, with your leadership team in the room, that defines every stage the same way and defines it in terms of what the buyer did.
Most stage models describe what your company is doing. Sent the proposal. Ran the demo. A buyer does not care what you sent. The buyer is recognizing a problem, considering solutions, and solving the problem, and a stage model that is not built on those three will always produce a forecast that is a negotiation, because the exit criteria are seller opinions rather than buyer facts. The title I put on that distinction when I teach it is buyer-verified outcomes, and underneath it, “the difference between activity and outcome.” A stage exit the seller declares and the buyer has never confirmed is “a figment of your imagination” until you have attached to a buying process, and to “gates that a buyer passes through.”
One stage, filled in
This is what the instrument actually looks like. The stage below is a generic one, written out the way every stage in your process gets written out. The name of the stage is yours to choose.
- Stage
- Validating the solution. Your name for it, not mine.
- Where the buyer is
- Considering solutions to the problem. He is deciding whether this will work and who else has to agree.
- Stage objective
- The economic buyer is confident and clear on why buy, why now, and why from you.
- Buyer-verified outcomes, which are the exit criteria
- Confirms in writing that doing nothing is off the table.
- Agrees the success criteria the proof has to meet, and then agrees they were met.
- Names the required capabilities and the metrics they will be judged against.
- Walks you through the decision process and the paper process, including who signs.
- Agrees a written mutual success plan to value realization, with a champion someone other than the rep has spoken to.
- Forecast guidance
- Best case. The category is bound to the gate rather than to the rep's confidence. If a line above this one is not true, the deal is not in this stage and does not carry this weight in the roll up.
- Activities and behaviors by role
- Sales
- Builds the proof plan with the buyer rather than for them. Runs the kickoff, the office hours and the standing success-criteria review. Multi-threads to a second and third stakeholder. Sends the executive update. Introduces customer success now, not at signature.
- Solution consulting
- Connects the technical requirements to the economic benefit. Builds the return and the total cost with sales. Validates the go-live plan.
- Marketing
- Supplies the reference buying process, the required capabilities for solving this category of problem, and proactive references before they are asked for.
- Customer success
- Owns the implementation milestones inside the mutual success plan, at this stage, while the deal is still being won.
- What you hand the buyer, and what you have to get back
- You give the reference buying process, the capability reference and the references. You get their decision process, their paper process, their success criteria and the names of everyone who has to agree. Tracked as a pair, because a stage where you only gave is a stage you did not exit.
- Transition points
- None at this stage. The next one is at closed won, from sales to customer success, and what crosses it is the current state and its implications, the needed future state and its impact, the required capabilities and their leading indicators, and the champion. The handoff carries the value hypothesis, not the paperwork.
The rest of what it isClose
It settles the things a stage model usually leaves to opinion: exit criteria the buyer verified rather than the rep asserted, and forecast guidance that means the same thing in a forecast call as it does in a deal review. It settles the rest of it too: activities and behaviors defined by role and organized around the buyer rather than around your org chart, and handoffs between teams that carry the value hypothesis rather than the paperwork.
The buyer's journey is the spine
Recognize the problem, consider solutions, solve the problem. Every stage you keep sits inside one of those three, and the whole cross-functional team is orchestrated against it: product, marketing, the SDR team, sales, implementation, customer success, finance and go-to-market leadership. That is what makes this more than a sales process. Handoffs stop being handoffs when everyone is aiming at the same three things the buyer is doing. It is also why this is not the sales leader's document to approve. Your Chief Product Officer and your Chief Customer Officer each own part of what happens inside a stage, and they own it while the deal is still live rather than at the two ends of it.
I do not arrive with a stage set
The last two processes I built have different numbers of stages, named differently, because the stages are an output of your leadership team's session rather than an input I brought to it. What is constant is the rows: every stage gets an objective, buyer-verified exit criteria, forecast guidance, activities by role, the assets that support them and the transition points out of it. That is the thing that travels. My only guidance on the count is to keep it simple, and that fewer stages can be more.
This is the difference between a facilitated build and a framework sale. It is built with the leadership team, not configured in the CRM and announced.
The rows most people do not expect
Two of them are about hiring. Once you have written down the activities each role performs at each stage, you can separate the skills you enable from the attributes you hire for, build the enablement program for the teachable and hire for the un-teachable. The process document quietly becomes the hiring scorecard and the new-hire ramp path, which is why it is worth writing down properly rather than approximately.
The scaffolding that coaching hangs from
This is the quiet reason the offer exists. Without shared stage definitions there is nothing for a manager to coach against, and inspection collapses back into checking whether a CRM field is filled in. A standard that is only applied when a human is available is not a standard, and a standard nobody agreed on is not one either.
- Manager inspection points are tied to those exit criteria. This offer defines them; coaching your managers to use them is Leadership and Manager Coaching →
- A conversation your sellers can actually run inside the stages. Sales Training and GTM Transformation →
- Reinforcement that scales beyond whoever happens to be available. AI Enablement and Build →
Why it matters
Impact it creates
A stage means the same thing to marketing, to sales and to customer success.
There is one document, written against what the buyer did rather than against what your company sent, so the argument in a deal review is about the deal instead of about what the stage means.
The forecast call becomes a readout.
Guidance is bound to the gate rather than to the rep's confidence, so a deal sitting in commit is there because the buyer confirmed something, and the roll up carries weight you can act on.
The gaps between teams have owners.
Each transition point names who is involved, what information transfers, who owns the action and what usually goes wrong there, so the work that used to fall between two functions belongs to somebody before a deal reaches it.
Managers have something to inspect.
Inspection questions written against the exit criteria give a pipeline review a subject, and a manager new to the team inherits the standard rather than inventing one.
You can see which of your stages was measuring you rather than the buyer.
Your existing stages get mapped against recognize, consider and solve, and the ones that only ever recorded your own activity stop being treated as evidence that a deal is moving.
The process gets maintained instead of aging.
A named internal owner and a review cadence are agreed before I leave, so the document changes when your business does.
Who it is for
What I usually hear before this starts
- Our forecast is a negotiation rather than a readout; commit slips late and nobody saw it coming.
- Two functions gave the board two different definitions of the same pipeline stage.
- Revenue operations was asked to fix forecast accuracy and has correctly worked out that the problem is not in the CRM.
- Deals go quiet at the handoff between teams and nobody owns the gap.
This is the problem this offer is bought against. The full page →
How it runs
- Format
- A leadership alignment session first, to agree the stages, their objectives and their gates. Then facilitated working sessions to build the document stage by stage. Pre-work goes out ahead of the first session, thirty minutes per executive, answered on a form, and I synthesize the answers before anyone gets in a room. That first session exists so the build is not spent relitigating decisions that belong to the leadership team.
- Duration
- The alignment session runs an hour and a half to two hours. The build session runs about four hours. In a large enterprise with several motions and several products, the build is nine to twelve hours and is worth splitting across breakout groups rather than compressing.
- Building it is separate from rolling it out
- Two commitments, and I keep them apart on purpose. The build is a defined number of hours with a defined group, and it produces the process. The rollout is your organization changing how it works: the systems configured, the managers taught to inspect against the gates, the ramp path rewritten, the maintenance owner named and actually doing it. I will sit in that second half wherever you want me in it, and I will say plainly which parts of it are mine and which are your team's. What I will not do is let a four-hour build session be sold to you as the moment your process changed.
- Who must be engaged
- For the alignment session, the leaders who own marketing, sales, customer success and revenue operations. That session is not complete without your Chief Product Officer and your Chief Customer Officer sitting in it, and the specimen above shows why: the required capabilities a buyer names and the metrics he will judge them against are the product organization's to stand behind, and the implementation milestones inside the mutual success plan are customer success work performed while the deal is still being won. Both sit inside the rows of every stage rather than in a consultation after the fact. For the build, the people who actually run the stages: frontline managers, a couple of good sellers, whoever owns the CRM. Frontline managers are not optional. They are the people who will inspect this afterwards, and a process they were handed rather than built will be inspected for one quarter.
- What you supply
- Your current stage definitions and exit criteria, whatever state they are in. Thirty minutes of pre-work from each executive, answered honestly. Win, loss and slippage history if you have it. A champion for each part of the buyer journey. And a decision about who owns the process after I leave, which should exist before we start rather than after.
- The ground rule
- We build for the next three months. Exceptions and futures get captured in a different color for the next version rather than argued about now. It is the single thing that keeps a build session from becoming a strategy offsite.
- What it is not
- A CRM implementation, a revenue operations staffing engagement, or a forecasting tool. I define what the stages mean and what has to be true to move between them. Configuring your system to match is your team's work or your integrator's, and I will happily sit in that review.
Two reasons this works
Encoded Into the Operating Rhythm, and Into Your Systems
The document does not stay a document. Gates become the fields and the evidence your CRM requires before a stage can change. Forecast categories get bound to those gates. Each transition point gets an owner, a trigger and a payload, so the handoff at closed won is a meeting that happens rather than a message somebody meant to send. The meetings that inspect the process are named on the process, which is how it enters the calendar instead of the wiki.
Why that mattersClose
Revenue: a stage that means one thing produces a forecast you can act on a month earlier. Cost: the arguments that used to be re-run every quarter get decided once and written down. Risk: your system of record starts reflecting what is true in the buyer's organization rather than what a rep hoped was true.
The last build was codified into the client's CRM and the deal collaboration tool the team was already using, and the ownership of that codification was agreed in the room before the build started.
Designed To Last
The process is the thing that survives the people. A new manager inherits inspection questions rather than inventing them. A new seller ramps against a written standard rather than against whoever is sitting nearest. Versioning is agreed at the start, an owner is named before I leave, and the futures nobody could agree on are parked in the document rather than lost.
Why that mattersClose
Cost: no second rollout in eighteen months when the team turns over. Risk: the way you sell stops living in a few people's heads, which is the thing a board or an acquirer actually asks about.
The clearest signal I have that one of these took hold is that the leadership team started editing it themselves. An executive arguing in the margin about whether a stage objective was stated correctly. An operator arguing that the most complicated handoff deserved its own section rather than sitting inside another one. People do not annotate a document they were handed. They annotate one they own.
What it is like to work with me
“I had the privilege to work with Russell 3 times. After many years of selling and sales leadership where I have been trained at Solution Selling twice, Customer Centric Selling 3 times, Sandler once, Force Management 3 times, I can easily say that Russell is one of the best facilitators of sales training I have met. His ability to lead a room with 2, 3 or 400 people is absolutely incredible. Russell has this gift of feeling the energy of the people he interacts with and can instantly adapt his speech to them; Russell has an extremely strong psychology and can really lead and inspire others through a shared objective. Last point that really inspired me when I was working with him is that Russell enjoyed so much what he does that it is contagious with everyone and make them enjoying learning.”
“Russell, I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate your efforts this week! I’ve been through many sales trainings and this was the best I’ve ever attended, much due to you. My team is pumped!”
“Russell, I teared up at the end of your session b/c you reminded me of why I loved sales strategy so much. Thank you for your warmth, the kindness you exuded, and the passion you shared.”
“I was not exaggerating when I told you, and several others, that I have been in many training classes over the years, and this will absolutely stand out as the best one, bar none.”
“Russell’s ability to break down complex concepts into simple, actionable strategies made an immediate impact. Since then, I’ve brought him back multiple times. Russell has a unique talent for making sophisticated sales principles easy to understand and, more importantly, easy to apply in day-to-day selling. Russell immediately elevates any GTM teams efforts.”
Questions people ask
We already have stages in our CRM. Isn't this that?
Probably not, and the test takes a minute. Look at the exit criteria for your current stage three. If they describe something your company did, sent the proposal, completed the demo, they are activity criteria, and activity criteria cannot tell you whether a deal is real. Buyer-verified exit criteria describe something the buyer said, sent or did. That difference is why the forecast is a negotiation.
How many stages should we have?
Whatever your leadership team can agree on and enforce, which is fewer than you think. I do not bring a stage set. Two processes I built have different numbers of stages with different names, and both of them work, because the value is in the rows underneath each stage and in the gate at the end of it. Keep it simple. Fewer stages can be more.
Isn't this revenue operations' job?
Revenue operations owns the system and usually owns the reporting. What is missing is rarely the system. It is an agreement, across marketing, sales and customer success, about what a stage means and what has to be true to leave it, and that agreement is a facilitation problem rather than a configuration problem. Your revenue operations leader should be in the room. This is usually the thing they have been asking for.
We already rolled out MEDDPICC. Do we need this too?
They do different jobs, and confusing them is why rollouts fade. A process tells you where you are, what has to happen and who does it. A qualification framework is the internal language for describing an opportunity and deciding what to do next. A conversational methodology is the external language, how the conversation with the buyer actually goes. Neither of the last two tells you the sequence, and if you are not coaching the how, you cannot coach behavior.
Do we have to buy the training as well?
No, and neither one is a prerequisite for the other. The sequence I give clients is crawl, walk, run: define the stages, build them out and put them in your systems, then layer the qualification framework and the conversational methodology on top. Plenty of teams already have a methodology that is sound and unexecuted, and for them this is the cheaper half of the problem.
We are a big organization with several products and motions. Can one person build this with us?
Yes, and the mechanism is not more of my people. In a large build I split the group and facilitate breakout teams that each take a part of the buyer journey, with a named champion for each part who owns it afterwards, and then reconvene to reconcile. That is also why the build runs nine to twelve hours at that size rather than four. The constraint is your leadership team's calendar, not my capacity, and I would rather tell you that before you buy than after.
This is Align work, and it reaches into all three. Aligning your organization on what a stage means is not a strategy exercise; it is the thing that makes every later coaching conversation and every later inspection possible. Your goal, done together, and what I bring is the how: I run the room, and I hold the buyer-verified standard at the point where the room would like to lower it.
What changes is the forecast call.
Every deal in commit has a written mutual success plan and a champion someone other than the rep has spoken to, and the stage it sits in means the same thing to marketing, to sales and to customer success. The call stops being an argument about whether the number is real and becomes a short conversation about which two deals need something from you this week.
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