Sales team procedures: which ones you need and how to roll them out

“That’s how we do it” breaks down at the second salesperson

Monday, 9:20 a.m. A new rep asks the colleague at the next desk what to do with a client who asked on Friday to be called back “sometime this week”. The colleague says: “I usually message them on WhatsApp and see how it goes.” At the morning meeting the manager says something else entirely. A month later three people have three ways of handling the same kind of client, and there is no way to compare their results.

While the team is one salesperson with the owner sitting nearby, the rules live in people’s heads and get passed on by word of mouth. Once there are two or three people, verbal agreements start to drift apart. Everyone remembers their own version, and arguing is pointless: there is no written rule.

A sales procedure captures what already works for your best salesperson and makes it standard for everyone. It answers the questions a rep asks themselves dozens of times a day: how long a reply can wait, when to call again, what to write in the deal record, who takes the client before a vacation.

If you don’t yet know where exactly your team is losing clients, start with a review. The process is covered in the article on auditing a sales team. Procedures written around the gaps you find close real losses right away, and your reps can see why they need the new rules.

Which procedures a small business sales team needs

A small team doesn’t need a forty-page binder. Six short documents are enough, one for each situation:

• Handling an enquiry: how fast to reply in each channel and what to say in the first message.
• Handling a deal in the CRM: which fields to fill in and at which stage.
• Next step: every open deal has a task with a date.
• Client handover: vacations, departures, rebalancing the workload.
• Handling lost deals: how many touches before closing the deal and how to record the reason.
• Reporting: what a rep submits, when and in what form.

Call scripts sit right next to them, but that’s a separate topic. A procedure says what to do and by when. A script suggests the words. Mixing them in one document is awkward: the script changes almost every month, the rules for handling deals far less often.

Writing all six at once is hard. Start with the one where you lose the most. Usually that’s the first response and the next step: that’s where clients leave without a word, and reports don’t show it.

Six procedures on one sheet: what each one covers and who is responsible for it.

The first enquiry: response time and the first message

Wednesday, 1:10 p.m. A client writes on Telegram: “How much is delivery to Podolsk?” One rep is at lunch, the other is in a meeting. The reply goes out at 2:30 p.m., and by then the client already has prices from two other companies and is choosing between them.

The enquiry-handling procedure sets a standard for each channel. For example: a callback request from the website — call back within fifteen minutes; a messenger message — reply within ten; an Avito enquiry — within half an hour. Choose the numbers to fit your volume and headcount. What matters is that they are written down and the same for everyone.

Add a separate line on who replies when the assigned person is busy: whoever is on duty, the manager or a robot. And what happens to an enquiry after the office closes. In our live GetGate project, 27% of enquiries came in after hours and on weekends, and before, they used to wait until morning.

The first message is worth spelling out too. At a minimum: greet the client by name, answer the question they asked, ask one of your own. “Hello, Marina! We can deliver to Podolsk tomorrow; the price depends on the weight. How many boxes will there be?” A reply like that keeps the conversation going. A template “Your request has been received” cuts it off.

The deal in the CRM, the next step and client handover

The deal-handling procedure answers one question: what needs to be in the deal record so that any colleague can grasp the situation in a minute. Usually that’s the source, the need, the ballpark amount, the timeline and the history of contact. Chats in a rep’s personal WhatsApp never make it into that history, so it’s worth connecting all channels to the CRM.

The next-step rule fits in one sentence: every open deal has a task with a date and a clear action. “Call” is a bad task. “Call on Thursday before 12:00 and find out whether the director has approved the invoice” is a good one. If tasks still pile up and go overdue, the causes and fixes are covered in the article on overdue tasks in CRM.

Client handover is most often not described at all. A rep goes on vacation for two weeks, their deals stall, the client calls the rep’s personal number and gets voicemail. Write into the procedure who takes over the deals, by when, and what the person handing over leaves in the deal record.

A short note on each client is enough: “Waiting for a quote on two options, deciding with his wife, asked not to be called before lunch.” The colleague picks up the conversation where the previous rep left off, and the client doesn’t have to explain everything again.

Lost deals and reporting: the last things anyone thinks about

A lost deal without rules looks like this: the client didn’t answer two messages, and the rep closed the deal with the reason “too expensive”. The lost-deal procedure sets the number of touches before closing, say three in a week across different channels, and a list of reasons to choose from. “Not responding” and “went to a competitor” call for different fixes.

For “not relevant right now” refusals, a follow-up rule helps. A client who said in spring “we’ll think about it after the holidays” may come back in autumn if someone reminds them. Such deals are moved to a separate stage with a dated task so they don’t get lost in the archive.

Reporting in a small team should take minimal effort. If the data is already in the CRM, the manager opens the report themselves, and reps have no reason to recount numbers in Excel. What the procedure asks of the rep is something else: move deals through the stages on time and fill in the fields, otherwise the report shows last week.

A short weekly check-in is enough: how many new enquiries came in, how many reached an invoice, how many were lost and why. A quarter of an hour on Friday replaces daily spreadsheets that nobody reads anyway.

How to write a procedure people actually follow

A procedure that gets read fits on one page. Each rule is a separate step with a verb and a deadline: “reply”, “set a task”, “move to stage”. An item that can’t be checked stays a wish. “Be polite to the client” is a wish. “Address the client by name in the first message” is a rule.

Each step needs an example from your own practice. Reps read “record the agreement in the deal record” in different ways until they see a sample: “Tue, 4:20 p.m. Spoke on the phone, option B works for the client, expects the invoice by Friday. Task for Thursday: check payment.”

The last line of each item is who checks and how often. A rule without someone checking it lasts until the first rush. The checking can be done by the manager, a senior rep, or a CRM report that flags violations on its own.

Write it together with the people who will follow it. Ask your best salesperson what they do with a client who went quiet after the invoice. Their answer, written down step by step, is already a ready-made procedure item. Colleagues will accept it more willingly than a text handed down from above.

Where to keep the procedure and how to roll it out

The procedure should live where the rep works. A file in a shared folder gets opened once, when someone is hired. It’s handier to pin a link in the team’s Telegram work chat or right in amoCRM and Bitrix24, in the pipeline stage description: the rep moves a deal and sees what is required at that stage.

Roll out one procedure at a time. Get the team together for half an hour, walk through the steps on real deals from the CRM and agree on a start date. For the first two weeks, go over every violation calmly: most often the rule is worded unclearly and needs fixing.

A common mistake is to introduce a procedure and leave everything around it unchanged. The new rule requires every deal to have a task, but the bonus scheme only pays for closed sales. The rep will put their energy into closing and forget the tasks. Check the procedure against the pay scheme in advance.

For a new hire, the procedures become a textbook. On day one they read six pages and immediately work by the same rules as everyone else. They no longer need a week of picking up the habits of the person at the next desk.

Let the CRM enforce part of the procedure

Whatever can be checked automatically is better handed to the system. Required fields in amoCRM won’t let a deal move to the next stage until the rep has entered the budget or the reason for the loss. The rule enforces itself, and there’s nothing to argue about.

Auto-tasks at each stage take care of the next-step rule. A deal lands in the “Proposal sent” stage, and the CRM sets a task to call in two days on its own. A client writes on Telegram, and the assigned rep gets a notification and a task to reply.

Escalating overdue items keeps deadlines in check. An enquiry sits unanswered longer than the standard, and the manager gets a Telegram message. A task is a day overdue, and the deal is highlighted in the list. We build the pipeline, fields and rules like these around your procedure during an amoCRM implementation.

Automation doesn’t replace the document. The CRM watches deadlines and fields, while the quality of the conversation, the right question and an honest reason for a loss stay with people. That’s why the procedure is written first, and the settings are configured to match it.

Checking without micromanaging

A manager has no time to listen to every call and reread every chat, and there’s no need to. It’s convenient to build checks in three layers. The first is automatic: a report on overdue items, empty fields and first-response time. It takes five minutes to review every morning.

The second layer is sampling. Once a week, take three deals from each rep: one won, one in progress and one lost. Check them against the procedure: is there a task, are the fields filled in, does the loss reason match what was actually in the chat.

The third layer is a conversation. Friday, 5:00 p.m., ten minutes per person: what worked, where a rule got in the way. You discuss the deals and the rules themselves, so the rep hears a review of their work rather than feeling watched.

When there are hundreds of conversations a week, AI can take over the checklist sampling: it scores every conversation and shows the manager only the deviations. For a small team starting out, the first two layers are usually enough.

When to revise the procedure

A procedure goes stale along with the process. A new channel appears, say Avito, the product changes, three new hires join. A recurring violation is also a reason: if everyone breaks a rule, it’s most likely inconvenient or unnecessary.

A good rhythm is once a quarter. The manager and the best salesperson sit down for an hour and go through each item with one question: do we actually do this? Items nobody follows, and whose absence broke nothing, get deleted.

Record every change with a date and a reason: “March: shortened the WhatsApp response standard, clients were going to whoever replied faster.” Six months later you’ll be able to see where a rule came from and whether it’s safe to touch.

If you want an outside view, procedures, scripts, lost-deal analysis and onboarding for reps are all part of our practice area for building a sales department. We start by reviewing your team: we look at where clients are being lost and write rules for exactly those spots.