The 30-second version
reps still follow the process eight months after the workshop.
is what it costs a rep to skip the process. So they skip it.
Did this deal meet its exit criteria, or did it just move?
Picture this. Eight months ago, the CEO of a mid-sized industrial supplier in Hesse signed off on a new sales process. Stage names. Exit criteria. A CRM rebuilt to match it. A two-day workshop where every rep nodded along.
Today, three of his five reps are running their own version of it. One still calls it “Discovery,” “Demo,” “Proposal”, the same three stages he’s used since 2019. The process exists. On paper.
Process signed off. Exit criteria defined. CRM rebuilt. Two-day workshop.
Three reps run their own version. Stages are suggestions.
Irgendwie, it stopped mattering somewhere between the workshop and the next quarter-end push.
01The process isn’t the problem. The pressure is.
Here’s what almost never gets said out loud in a leadership meeting: your sales process didn’t fail because it was badly designed. It failed because nobody was enforcing it when it cost something to enforce it.
In more than twenty years in B2B sales, I have rarely seen a team follow its own sales methodology once a customer is in the room. Not “don’t know it.” Don’t follow it.
The knowledge is there.
The discipline isn’t.
This is not a training gap, and another workshop won’t fix it. Reps know the exit criteria. They skip them because nothing happens when they do.
02Why the process dies quietly
A sales process holds under one condition: it costs something to violate it. If a rep can advance a deal to “Proposal” without the buyer ever confirming budget, and nobody stops them, the rep learns the real rule, not the documented one.
The real rule becomes:
stages are suggestions.
This usually isn’t a rep failure. It’s a manager failure, and even that’s too simple. It’s a pressure failure. The manager has six deals to review on Friday and a forecast call on Monday.
Friday. A deal moved stage without meeting its exit criteria.
Pull it back a stage
An uncomfortable conversation, a smaller pipeline number, and a harder Monday call.
A forecast you can trust.
Let it slide
Nothing.
The deal dies in “Negotiation” and the forecast is wrong again.
The manager who let it slide isn’t in the room when it dies. That is why discipline erodes quietly, deal by deal, with no moment anyone could point to and say “this is where it broke.”
03What this costs a German Mittelstand company specifically
In a flat, consensus-driven organization (five sales managers, one VP Sales, a CEO who still reviews the top accounts personally) there is no layer whose job is purely to enforce. Everyone enforcing the process is also the person under pressure to hit the number.
That’s a structural conflict,
not a character flaw in your managers.
The result: stage definitions that meant something in Q1 mean nothing by Q3. “Technical Validation” was supposed to require Security’s sign-off. Now it means a friendly call.
04The fix is not a bigger playbook
It’s an external check. Someone in the room whose only job is to ask one question:
The only question that holds a process
Did this deal actually meet its exit criteria, or did it just move?
That question is hard for an internal manager to ask consistently. Not because they don’t care, but because they’re never just the enforcer.
They’re also the person whose own number depends on the deal moving.
Your team didn’t abandon the process because it was wrong. They abandoned it because nothing held the line when holding the line was inconvenient. Fix that, and the process you already built starts working again.
One test for this week
Pull the last ten deals that moved stage. For each one, check the exit criteria you wrote down.
How many actually met them?
Whatever that number is, it is how much of your process is still alive.
Irgendwie.
Irgendwie isn’t a flaw in your team. It’s what happens to any standard nobody is paid to defend.
No obligation. Just an honest assessment.
Sources
- The Hesse example is illustrative.