The thing that no one is telling you about sales is that it’s the unsexy side of things that creates scale.

So let’s get that out of the way early.

Systemisation is not sexy. Well, perhaps it’s percetion isn’t. It’s certainly not the part of sales that gets people fired up at conferences. Nobody’s doing a fist pump over a well-documented SOP.

But here’s what we know after years of building and fixing sales engines. Systemisation is the thing that separates businesses that grow from businesses that just ‘exist’.

It’s the thing that holds your people together, holds your engine together, and makes sure that everything happens when it’s supposed to happen. Not because you got lucky. Not because you hired a superstar. But because you built something that actually works.

So let’s talk about it. Because if your pipeline feels unpredictable, your team feels stretched, and you’re not sure why good opportunities keep slipping through the cracks. The answer is almost certainly here

The follow-up problem nobody wants to admit

I’m going to hit you with some numbers, and they’re uncomfortable.

48% of salespeople never even follow up with a prospect.

Not once. Nearly half of all sales conversations just… end. The prospect raises their hand, shows interest, and then hears nothing. That's a terrifying stat.

Now, you might look at that and think, “That’s a people problem.” And sure, maybe it is. But more often than not, it’s a system problem. Your team is too busy, too overloaded, too stretched across too many responsibilities and there’s nothing in place to catch what falls through the gaps.

It gets worse.

25% of salespeople make a second contact and then stop.

Another...

12% will get to three touchpoints before giving up.

And only ...

10% of salespeople will contact a prospect more than three times.

That’s a leaky bucket. That’s not a pipeline. It’s a sieve.

Now flip the script. Look at what happens when you actually follow up consistently:

• 2% of deals close on first contact.
• 3% on second contact.
• 5% on third.
• 10% on fourth.

But if you can get to 5, 6, 7, 8, even 12+ touchpoints, your success rate climbs dramatically.

The data doesn’t lie. The businesses that win are the ones that keep showing up. And the only way to keep showing up, reliably, at scale, without burning your team out. Is through systemisation.

Stop hiring unicorns

Here’s a trap I see businesses fall into constantly. The hunt for the unicorn salesperson.

You know the one. They prospect, they nurture, they close, they manage accounts, they create content, they do follow-ups. They do everything. And they’re brilliant at all of it.

Except they don’t exist. Or if they do, they’re either wildly expensive or completely unsustainable. You’re stretching one person across every component of your pipeline and wondering why things are breaking.

Even if you find someone exceptional, loading them up with the entire sales engine isn’t scaling. It’s gambling. You’re one resignation away from your pipeline collapsing.

Systemisation fixes this. Not by removing the need for talented people, but by putting them in the right place and making them as effective as possible. You stop asking one person to do everything. You start building an engine where roles are clear, responsibilities are defined, and no single departure can bring the whole thing down.

The key ingredients to systemisation

So how do you actually systemise a sales engine? It comes down to four things to design your engine from.

Repeatability

Start by asking a simple question.

What tasks do we do over and over again?

Every business has them. Follow-up sequences. Content posting. Pipeline reviews. Proposal generation. Data entry. The list goes on.

Identify them. Codify them. Write them down, even if it’s a rough workflow to start with. Train your team on them. What happens next is powerful: you create learned behaviours. Your team stops reinventing the wheel every time and starts executing with speed and consistency. That’s when things compound.

Focus

Sales teams often feel like they’re trying to boil the ocean. Everything feels urgent, nothing gets the attention it deserves, and people are pulled in ten directions at once.

The fix is atomisation. Break your sales and marketing engine into its individual components. Who handles pricing? Who manages content posting? Who owns bottom-of-funnel nurture? Who does off-platform engagement?

Each of these is a micro-responsibility. And each one needs a clearly defined owner, not a vague “we all chip in” arrangement. Clarity creates focus. Focus creates results.

Ownership

Ownership isn’t about one person carrying the whole engine. It’s about lower-level, atomised accountability. Every person in your team should know exactly what’s expected of them, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Maybe even hourly, depending on the role.

When people have clarity, they feel empowered. When they feel empowered, they take initiative. When they take initiative, they drive results. And the accountability loop reinforces all of it.

But here’s the kicker, this only works if it’s documented. If ownership lives in someone’s head, it doesn’t really exist. Write it down. Make it visible. Make it part of how your business runs.

Process

This is where it all comes together. Process is king. Without clearly defined processes, nothing else sticks.

And here’s the irony: most service-led businesses have processes everywhere, in delivery, in HR, in finance, in procurement. But sales and marketing? Often, it’s the wild west. No documented workflows. No SOPs. Just vibes and hustle.

That has to change.

The art and science of sales

Now, I’m not saying sales is purely mechanical. Far from it. Sales will always require human skill, the ability to read between the lines, to listen deeply, to show empathy, to adapt in the moment, to build genuine trust.

That’s the art of sales. And you absolutely need people who have it.

But art without science is chaos. You need both.

The science is process architecture. It’s channel management. It’s disciplined data handling. It’s automation that removes menial, repeatable tasks from your team’s plate. It’s SOPs that make the complex simple and the simple consistent.

The art gets you in the room. The science makes sure you keep showing up.

Building the operating rhythm

One of the most transformative things you can do for your sales engine is establish a rhythm. Not a vague “let’s check in sometimes” rhythm. A structured, intentional operating cadence.

Daily rhythm. What does your team do every single day? What are the non-negotiables?

Weekly rhythm. Pipeline reviews, content planning, performance check-ins, what anchors the week?

Monthly rhythm. Broader reporting, strategy adjustments, process reviews.

Quarterly rhythm. Big-picture evaluation, roadmap planning, optimisation cycles.

This rhythm does something powerful: it creates momentum. And momentum, in sales, is everything. Deals don’t move themselves. Pipelines don’t build themselves. But a team operating in a consistent, well-defined rhythm? They move mountains.

And here’s an important nuance, the rhythm looks different depending on where you are in the funnel. Top of funnel is about scaled demand generation. Middle of funnel is about nurture, prioritisation, and keeping deals warm. Bottom of funnel is about closing with urgency.

Each requires its own cadence, its own priorities, and its own micro-processes. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work here.

Get granular with your pipeline

Most businesses I see have one pipeline with six or seven stages. Lead, meeting, proposal, negotiation, closed won, closed lost. Done.

It’s not enough. What happens is your pipeline stages get incredibly deep, dozens of opportunities stacked in a single column, and it becomes psychologically overwhelming. Your team slows down. Follow-ups get missed. Deals go cold.

The fix? Segment your pipelines. Think about running separate pipelines for:

• Top-of-funnel LinkedIn outreach
• Top-of-funnel manual outreach
• Middle-of-funnel nurture
• Bottom-of-funnel closing
• ABM campaigns
• Existing client account growth
• Lost, lapsed, and sunset opportunities

That last one is critical and gets forgotten constantly. Those “dead” deals? They’re not dead. They’re dormant. And with the right systemised approach, they can come back to life.

When you segment, you can codify every step within each pipeline. Clear definitions, clear actions, clear next-best-action thinking. Your team knows exactly what to do at every stage, and deals move with purpose.

Change is most successful when layered

Here’s where a lot of businesses trip up. They see the vision of a fully systemised sales engine, they get excited, and they try to build the whole thing at once.

Don’t.

If you try to design the ivory tower and deploy it in one go, two things happen. First, you waste months designing instead of doing. Second, the change is too much for your team to absorb, and it collapses under its own weight.

Instead, layer it. Start small. Build a base layer of processes, embed them, let your team get comfortable, and then add the next layer. And the next. And the next.

Think of it as a change roadmap:

1. Start with a one-month plan. Define the key activities and processes that will have the biggest impact or are the easiest to tackle.
2. Build to a three-month plan. Layer in more complexity, more SOPs, more accountability.
3. Extend to six and twelve months. Scale up. Optimise. Refine.

Create space for continuous optimisation at every stage. What you design today will need to evolve as your business grows. That’s not a flaw, that’s the point.

What to expect

When you commit to systemisation, here’s what starts to happen:

Efficiency. The right use of technology, including, yes, AI, can genuinely 10x your output. Not by replacing your people, but by removing the friction that slows them down.

Continuity. Your prospects get a consistent experience. Your channels get consistent attention. Your team operates with consistent standards. Predictability follows.

Deal momentum. Deals start moving. Cards shift across your CRM. Pipeline stages stop being parking lots and start being waypoints. This is where the compound effect kicks in, because you’re not losing opportunities to a leaky bucket anymore.

Compound results. This is the big one. When no opportunity gets wasted, when every prospect gets followed up, when your system catches what your people might miss, results compound. You stop being fixated on the one deal that might close and start realising that the other 99 in your pipeline are opportunities too.

Let’s wrap this up

If you take nothing else from this, here’s what I’d say. Just start.

Foundations first. Get your main processes documented. Even version one. Rough, imperfect, and incomplete is infinitely better than nothing.

People second. Define baseline roles and responsibilities. Don’t aim for perfection. Just get clarity on who owns what.

Rhythm third. Establish a weekly cadence. Then monthly. Build from there.

SOPs fourth. Pick your highest-impact, most repeatable processes. Define them, workshop them with your team, assign ownership, and roll them out.

Systemisation isn’t glamorous. It’s not going to win you any awards for creativity. But it is the single most impactful thing you can do to build a sales engine that doesn’t just work, but scales, compounds, and delivers results you can actually depend on.

Stop relying on unicorns. Stop hoping the pipeline will fix itself. Start building the system.

Because systems sell.

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