Your sales process refinement should never end

Sales, business development, and the broader process of GTM is a balancing act between experimentation and process.

It mirrors a concept in decision science and complex systems theory called the Explore-Exploit Trade Off.

The Explore-Exploit Trade Off is a fundamental dilemma in decision-making, where one must choose between exploring new possibilities (exploration) and leveraging known resources or strategies (exploitation).

In the context of sales and business development, this trade-off manifests in various ways:

• Testing new talking points and ways of pitching your product (exploration) versus using established pitches that have proven successful in the past (exploitation).
• Positioning your product in new ways to appeal to different customer segments (exploration) versus sticking with the positioning that has historically worked (exploitation).
• Experimenting with different pricing strategies (exploration) versus maintaining a consistent pricing model that has yielded results (exploitation).
• Trying out new sales channels or markets (exploration) versus focusing on existing, well-performing channels (exploitation).
• Changing up the stages of your sales funnel (exploration) versus sticking to a tried-and-true funnel structure (exploitation).

A lot of companies tend to have a “good enough” sales process that they have settled in with. It usually works reasonably well and is easy for the sales team to learn and follow. The problem is that any existing sales process is usually based on what has worked well in the past. In business, the things that got you to your current level of success likely aren’t the things that will get you to the next level.

Existing sales processes are often informed by past customer and prospect interactions. Meaning it is optimized to bring in more customers like the ones you currently have. But early customers are often a poor reflection of who your ideal customer is today or could be in the future.

This is why refining the sales and GTM processes needs to be a continuous process of experimentation and refinement.

For a fast moving startup, I would do a serious review of the sales process every quarter at least.