Most first VP Sales hires at Series A companies make the same mistake: they build the sales process they wish they had at their last job.
That's the wrong process for where you are right now.
You don't have a process problem yet. You have a pattern problem.
When you walk in the door, the company has probably closed 20-50 customers. Maybe the founder sold the first 30. Maybe a couple of hungry AEs closed the rest. Either way, those deals happened through instinct, relationships, and sheer persistence, not a repeatable motion.
Your job in the first 90 days isn't to install Salesforce stages and call it a process. It's to find the pattern inside those wins. Talk to every closed customer. Ask them what made them buy. Ask your AEs which deals felt easy and why. You're looking for the thread, the thing that shows up consistently when a deal closes fast and the thing that's missing when it doesn't.
At most Series A companies, that pattern is sitting in someone's head or buried in a Zoom recording nobody rewatched. Get it out.
Define the stages around buyer behavior, not seller activity
This is the most common process design mistake I see. Stages like "Demo Scheduled" or "Proposal Sent" describe what your rep did. They tell you nothing about where the buyer actually is.
Instead, build stages around what the buyer has done or agreed to. Something like:
- Qualified: Prospect has confirmed they have the problem you solve and the authority (or access to authority) to buy
- Demonstrated value: Prospect has seen a relevant demo and verbally acknowledged it addresses their use case
- Stakeholders aligned: Champion has introduced you to at least one other decision-maker
- Commercial: Pricing has been shared and prospect has responded with specific feedback or questions
- Closed: Contract signed
Five stages. Maybe six. Not twelve.
When a deal is in "Stakeholders Aligned," you know something real. When a deal is in "Proposal Sent," you know your rep clicked send. One of those is useful for forecasting. The other is just CRM theater.
Pick one qualification framework and actually use it
MEDDIC. SPICED. BANT. The debates about which framework is best are mostly a distraction. What matters is picking one and getting every rep to speak the same language.
At Series A, I'd lean toward something simpler than full MEDDIC. You probably don't have complex enterprise deals yet. You need your AEs asking four things consistently:
- What's the specific pain and what does it cost them (in time, money, or risk) if they don't fix it?
- Who actually makes this decision and have we talked to them?
- Is there a real timeline, and what's driving it?
- What does success look like to the buyer, and can we actually deliver that?
That's it. If your reps can answer all four with specifics, it's a real opportunity. If they're guessing on two of them, the deal isn't qualified, it's hopeful.
Document those four questions. Put them in your CRM as required fields before a deal advances past your second stage. Not as a bureaucratic checkbox exercise, but so you build a habit and so you can coach against real data.
“A deal your rep can't fully qualify isn't in your pipeline. It's in your stress.”
Build your discovery call before you build your demo
Most early-stage sales teams are demo-first. The founder built something cool, the early AEs learned to show it, and everyone thinks the demo is the product.
The discovery call is more important.
A good discovery call does two things. First, it surfaces the specific pain that makes your product worth buying. Second, it gives your AE the information they need to customize the demo so it lands instead of feeling like a feature tour.
Write out a discovery call guide. Not a script, a guide. It should cover the questions you want answered, the signals that indicate a good fit, and the signals that indicate you should disqualify early. Disqualification criteria are as important as qualification criteria. If you're selling project management software to a 5-person team and your ideal customer is 50-200 employees, your reps need to know to say that clearly and move on.
A Series A company with 4 AEs who each run 10 discovery calls a week can waste 40 calls a week on bad-fit prospects. That's not a pipeline problem. That's a focus problem.
Don't buy the enterprise stack yet
I've seen this play out a dozen times. New VP Sales joins a Series A, gets budget, and immediately starts procuring. Gong for call recording. Outreach for sequencing. Clari for forecasting. Six months later, half the tools are underused, the AEs hate the admin load, and the company is spending $3,000-4,000 per rep per year on software before anyone has proven the model.
Gong is a genuinely good product. I say that as someone who built a competing tool (TrailerCast, which I founded). Their conversation intelligence is best-in-class. But at $1,600 per rep per year, it's priced for companies that have already figured out what they're trying to measure. At Series A, you're still figuring that out.
Buy the tools that match your stage. You need CRM hygiene, call recording with some review capability, and a sequencing tool. That's the short list. Add complexity when the simple version breaks, not before.
The real deliverable isn't a process doc. It's shared language.
Here's what a good series a sales process actually produces: your AEs, your CEO, your investors, and your CSM team are all using the same words to describe the same things.
"This deal is stuck at Stakeholders Aligned because the champion went dark for two weeks" means something specific. Everyone knows what to do next. Compare that to "this deal is in late stage," which means nothing and leads to a 30-minute pipeline review that still ends in ambiguity.
Shared language is what makes coaching possible. It's what makes forecasting possible. It's what makes a new AE ramp faster because they can learn from what's already working instead of reinventing it.
Your process document matters. But the real test is whether your team is actually speaking the same language in Monday pipeline reviews. If they are, you built something real.
If you want reps to stop winging post-demo follow-up (and start giving buyers something worth revisiting between calls), that's a problem worth solving alongside the process work.