The leadership team is discussing a particular sales opportunity, and it should be straightforward. An existing customer is asking for a significant order of a non-core product, at a price well below normal margin thresholds and on a delivery timeline that would stretch the service team. The sales manager wants it, because the customer is asking for it and it closes the gap to the number, and has never much minded how the team achieves it. Finance likes the revenue and the cash, but not the margin, and certainly not the prospect of paying commission on a deal it regards as having been discounted to win. Marketing questions why the business is selling products outside its core propositions, and the head of service asks who is going to deliver and support it. The CEO feels the pull of all of it, wanting to grow revenue and look after a valued customer while also doing the right thing by the business and the strategy the CEO is accountable for, which this deal does little to advance.
Nobody in the room is wrong. Each of them is judging the opportunity against a different idea of which opportunities the salespeople should be pursuing, shaped by what matters most from where they sit, whether that is giving customers what they ask for and hitting quota, bringing in revenue and cash at the lowest cost of sale, staying focused on core propositions and target markets, keeping the service team productive or growing the business in line with the strategy. The disagreement feels as if it is about one deal, but the same discussion will happen over the next one, because the question underneath it has never been settled. Ask each of them separately what a good opportunity looks like and which ones the sales team should be targeting, and their five answers would be the five positions taken in this meeting.
The Question Nobody Asked
My previous newsletter looked beneath the sales stages at what a sales process needs to define, including what each stage must achieve, what good execution looks like and what must be true before an opportunity progresses. Every one of those definitions depends on an answer to the question this leadership team differ on, and qualification shows it most clearly. To the sales manager, a qualified opportunity is one the customer wants that can close this period for a meaningful amount. Finance would qualify on margin, payment terms and whether this is the kind of customer that pays on time and is worth the cost to serve. Marketing would qualify on fit with the target verticals and core propositions, the head of service on whether the work is in scope and deliverable with the capacity available, and the CEO on whether it grows the business in the direction the strategy intends.
The opportunity that divided the meeting passes the first of those tests and fails most of the others, which is exactly why it ended up being debated at leadership level. Each leader was applying their own qualification criteria after the fact, because none of them had been built into the process where the salesperson could apply them before the opportunity progressed. In principle, the company’s go-to-market strategy should settle which criteria matter most, but it rarely reaches far enough into how the business actually sells. That is why so many organisations have sales stages and little beneath them, because stages are the one part of a process that doesn’t require anyone to agree on what a good opportunity looks like, or which opportunities the salespeople should be targeting.
In most of the businesses I work with, nobody has ever made that decision deliberately. The question has been answered by default, gradually, by whatever happened to shape the business along the way. It may reflect the CEO’s style, the preferences of whichever sales manager was in the seat at the time, or the habits of the salespeople themselves. Where nothing else settles it, salespeople settle it for themselves, and they do so rationally, selling to whoever is easiest and quickest to win against the targets they have been given. Each of these is an answer to the question, but none of them is a decision.
What Fills the Gap
The gap is most visible when the number is short. Late in a difficult quarter, an opportunity like the one in the meeting stops looking like a strategic question and starts looking like a lifeline. Without an agreed view of what a good opportunity is, the gap to target makes the decision instead, and the business takes whatever comes in, at whatever margin is acceptable, whether it can deliver it well or not. Each of those deals seems sensible on its own. Together they quietly build a business that looks nothing like the strategy.
Salespeople aren’t the only ones answering the question, either. The commission plan answers it by rewarding all deals equally. Marketing’s lead definition answers it by counting any enquiry as a lead, and the hiring profile answers it by recruiting people for their past numbers rather than their fit with the markets the business wants. None of these was designed to work against the strategy, but each carries its own answer, and when they disagree, salespeople follow the one that pays. The absence of a decision is not the absence of an answer. It is the presence of several.
A Way of Selling Is a Choice
When leaders describe how their business sells, they usually describe an intention rather than a design. “We’re consultative”, “we build long-term relationships” and “we sell value, not price” are statements I hear often. What they rarely describe is a set of choices with consequences. An intention costs nothing to hold, whereas a choice commits the business to one thing, usually at the expense of another.
A way of selling is made up of choices of that kind. The business either actively pursues the customers it wants or largely responds to those who arrive. The salesperson may act as a specialist who diagnoses the problem, an advisor who shapes the decision, or an efficient channel for customers who already know what they need. Engagement may need to go deep before any solution can be proposed, or very little may be required. The sale may be made by one person or by a team, and price may enter the conversation early or only once value has been established.
This is a strategic decision, and it sits above methodology rather than competing with it. A methodology is a way of selling at the level of the conversation, shaping how a salesperson questions, qualifies and advances an opportunity for example. The decision described here determines which conversations are worth having, with whom and for what purpose, and the methodology is then applied within it. A business can train its people in an excellent methodology and still never have decided which opportunities it wants them to pursue.
These choices should not be made by preference. They should follow from who the organisation’s buyers are, how those buyers make decisions, what the offer genuinely requires, where the business wants to compete and what its commercial model can support. That is why there is no single best way of selling that applies to every organisation. A business selling complex, high-value solutions to customers who don’t yet understand their problem needs a very different way of selling from one supplying well-understood products to buyers who already know what they want. Responsive, efficient, high-volume selling is a perfectly legitimate design, and so is deep, consultative selling built on relationships. What matters is that the choice fits the organisation and is made deliberately.
Making it deliberately also means accepting its trade-offs. Choosing a consultative way of selling means accepting longer sales cycles, hiring more expensive and more experienced people, possibly in exchange for fewer and larger opportunities. Choosing a responsive, transactional model usually means accepting thinner engagement, greater exposure to price and a heavier dependence on volume. Neither option is free. An organisation that wants the benefits of both without accepting the costs of either has not yet made a choice.
This is also where the leadership team’s competing answers belong. The sales manager’s focus on what customers are asking for and on the number, finance’s margin and payment criteria, service’s need for deliverable work, marketing’s core propositions and target markets, and the CEO’s accountability for growth and strategy are all legitimate, and none of them should simply win. They are inputs to a single decision about how the business as a whole should sell, and making that decision means deciding which of them become firm qualification criteria and which are weighed case by case.
What the Decision Changes
Suppose the leadership team settles it. The business will concentrate on its target markets and core propositions, sell consultatively into them, and set clear margin and customer criteria for the work it takes on. The decision sounds like a sales decision. In practice it changes something for almost everyone who was in that meeting.
For the sales manager, the job shifts from chasing the number however it arrives to coaching salespeople to find and develop the right opportunities. Qualification now includes the criteria the leadership team agreed, so an opportunity like the one in the meeting is tested early rather than argued over later. Pipeline expectations change too, because fewer and larger opportunities in chosen markets make the old coverage ratios meaningless.
For finance, the argument moves out of the meeting room and into the process. Margin thresholds, payment terms and the kind of customer worth serving become part of how opportunities are qualified, and discounting authority is set to protect them. The commission plan has to follow, because a plan that pays the same for every dollar will keep rewarding exactly the deals the business has decided to avoid.
For marketing, the focus on target markets has to become something salespeople can use. That means propositions built around how buyers in those markets think, and conversations that start before a customer has settled on what they want and asked for a price. A request for a quote from outside those markets stops counting as a good lead simply because it signals intent.
For the head of service, capacity can finally be planned around the work the business has chosen rather than whatever sales happens to win. Utilisation still matters, but it becomes a result of selling the right work rather than a reason to sell any work. Existing customers outside the chosen markets still need looking after, and deciding how and by whom is part of the same decision.
Hiring and development change as well. The business now needs salespeople who understand its chosen markets and can hold a business conversation with a senior buyer, and it needs to give them time to become effective rather than expecting results in weeks. None of these changes was on the table when the leadership team made its decision, but each follows directly from it. A decision about how to sell is never only a sales decision.
Holding the Line
The real test comes the next time the number is short. Agreeing what a good opportunity looks like is easy in a planning session and much harder at the end of a difficult quarter, with a customer on the phone and a gap to close. A decision that gives way the first time revenue is under pressure was only ever a preference. The value of having made it deliberately is that the business can answer the question quickly and consistently, rather than arguing it again every time.
None of this means every opportunity becomes a simple yes or no. Sales rarely works that neatly, and some opportunities will genuinely need further investigation before anyone knows whether they fit, while others will fall outside the criteria for good reasons. What the decision provides is a set of guardrails, together with an agreed route for the exceptions. Opportunities that fit the criteria move forward without debate, and the larger or unusual ones that sit outside them come to the right people, who judge them against criteria everyone has already agreed rather than against five competing views of what matters. Flexibility still exists, but it sits within the decision rather than replacing it.
Back in that leadership meeting, the opportunity stops being a contest between five priorities. It becomes an exception judged against agreed criteria, with a clear answer, whether that answer is yes, no or yes on different terms. The test for any leadership team is the question this newsletter began with. Ask each member separately what a good opportunity looks like and which ones the salespeople should be targeting, then look at what the commission plan, the lead definition and the hiring profile say. If the answers agree, the business has made the decision. If they don’t, it has several.
Conclusion
This is where a Selling System begins. Before the process, the capability, the leadership rhythm or the tools can be designed, the business has to know what it is designing for, and the decision about which opportunities to pursue, and how, is that starting point. Once it is made, it creates requirements across the business, as the leadership team in this newsletter discovered. Next month’s newsletter looks at where those requirements land and how they combine to produce what actually happens in front of a customer. Design starts with a decision, and everything else is a consequence of it.