How to codify a sales process before a handover or sale

What actually transfers when you leave?

Less than most owners assume. And the parts sort into three groups that behave completely differently.

So steps and stages transfer, because they are already written somewhere or can be in an afternoon. Customer relationships transfer slowly, through introductions and time, and sometimes they do not transfer at all. But neither of those is where handovers actually fail.

They fail on the third row. Judgment does not move unless somebody deliberately moves it, and the person holding it is usually the last to notice they are holding anything. And that is not carelessness. It is that expertise stops feeling like expertise once you have it.

What is the unit you are actually capturing?

The decision, not the stage. But a stage only tells somebody where they are. A decision tells them what to do about it, which is the part they are stuck on at eleven minutes into a call when a finance director asks something unwelcome.

So for each situation the business meets often, write six lines:

1. The symptom. What can somebody actually hear or see that tells them they are in this situation?
2. The question. What establishes whether it is real rather than assumed?
3. The cost. What does it cost the buyer to leave it alone, in their terms?
4. The response. Which part of the offer meets it, and which part does not?
5. The proof. What makes that credible to this particular kind of sceptic?
6. The next move. What happens immediately after, including when the answer is to walk away.

And six lines per situation is the whole format. A dozen situations covers most of a business, which is a smaller job than it sounds and a much smaller job than documenting everything.

How much of it can really be written down?

Roughly eighty to ninety percent of an expert area. But not all of it. And the honest move is to say which part is which.

So that boundary is worth stating out loud, to your team and to anybody buying the business. A claim of total coverage invites one counterexample to destroy it. An explicit boundary, here is what the rules cover and here is what still needs a person, survives the counterexample because it predicted it. And it tells a successor exactly when to ask for help, which is the practical difference between a document that gets used and one that does not.

How do you prove the transfer actually happened?

And not by reviewing the document. By running an acceptance test, agreed before the work starts, on real cases.

Take deals from your own history, won, lost and the difficult ones. Hand them to somebody who is not the founder and ask them to decide: is this real, what is this objection about, what happens next, would you walk away. Then compare their decisions with the founder's. So where they match, the transfer worked. Where they diverge, you have found the missing rule, and that is useful rather than embarrassing.

And this matters more than it sounds if a sale is anywhere in view. A buyer cannot audit a binder in any meaningful way, but they can absolutely ask who closed the last ten deals and what happened when the founder was not available. An acceptance test on real cases produces the kind of answer that survives that question. There is more on how a buyer prices this in what your sales process is worth when you sell the company.

What order wastes the least time?

1. Start from closed deals, not from a blank template. Go back through the wins, the losses and the difficult ones, and ask what actually changed each buyer's mind.
2. Pick one sales motion to make repeatable first. Not the whole business, and not the rarest and most interesting case.
3. Write the decisions for the dozen situations that keep recurring, six lines each.
4. Draw the argument. A model that a person can redraw survives a handoff that a paragraph does not.
5. Test it on live opportunities with somebody who did not build the product, while the founder watches and stays quiet.
6. Fix the missing rule rather than adding another training session. Training does not close a gap in the argument.
7. Run the acceptance test on real historical cases, and write down the date it passed.

But the last step is the one people skip. Recording when the transfer happened turns a claim into evidence, and evidence is the only version of this that is worth anything to a third party later.

What goes wrong most often?

• Documenting the steps and calling it done. The stages were never the hard part, and writing them creates a convincing feeling of progress.
• Starting from somebody else's playbook. Their buyer, product and position are not yours, so the sequence does not transfer. Your own closed deals are the only reliable source material.
• Leaving out the exceptions. A rule without its exception is the part everybody already knew.
• The founder writing it alone. The parts hardest to see are the ones they stopped noticing years ago. Somebody has to ask.
• Treating it as a one-time project. The product changes, the market moves, and a frozen model quietly stops being true.

The bar to aim for, and it is a specific feeling rather than a metric, is the moment somebody says: that is exactly what I do, I just could never name it. Until somebody says that, the reasoning on the page is probably still a description of the process rather than the thing itself.

What does the work take, and what does it cost?

Most companies should attempt a first pass themselves, and the sequence above is the order to do it in. And the usual reason it stalls is that the founder is the worst placed person to hear how their own reasoning sounds to somebody who does not already share it.

If you want it done with you, this is the shape of it at Strategem. Two workshops. The first is diagnosis: the problem, the customer, the stakeholders and how each of them has to be spoken to. Between the workshops we draft the messaging and build candidate models. The second fuses the model into how you actually sell. You then use it in real conversations, and we meet again about three weeks later to correct whatever the field exposed. The extraction runs as structured interviews on your own real cases, won, lost and difficult, using grounded qualitative method from an organizational psychology PhD. We draw while we listen.

The price depends on who is buying, because a committee sale and an expert-led sale are not the same job. For a multi-person B2B company with committee buying, the opening workshop is €5.000 and a full engagement starts at €15.000. For a smaller or expert-led company, the workshop is €1.500 and the full engagement is €5.000. The price is fixed before we start, iteration until the agreed acceptance test passes is included, and if we stop early you pay only for the phases that finished.

Strategem was founded by Dr. Fritz Hermann, who holds a PhD in organizational psychology and spent a decade as a CMO, with work across banks, insurers and Premier League clubs. The same work runs on an expert whose exceptions all come back to them, on a founder the team keeps pulling back into deals, and on a champion who has to make the argument without you.