Sales.

The framework

1. 01

   Their job list, not your pipeline stages.

   Your stages describe what you do; the buyer's list is a different document, and most of it runs in rooms you'll never enter. CEB split it into three phases — early, where the customer is still working out whether a problem merits attention at all; middle, where they weigh approaches, build against buy, and what any of it does to the systems they already run; late, where they finally consider suppliers and meet a rep. Keep the map between five and about ten steps. Past ten it gets too cumbersome for a rep to use, which is the same as not having one.

2. 02

   Where it breaks changes as the purchase moves.

   CEB found the obstacles sort by phase, and knowing which phase you're in tells you what to bring. Early, the problems are informational: conflicting data, no way to separate the meaningful from the irrelevant, no sense of how much research is enough. In the middle they become people problems — competing priorities, hidden concerns, stakeholders who don't agree there's a need for change at all. Late, they turn into options issues: too many configurations, a new one introduced too late to assess, an implementation plan nobody can picture. Bring an information fix to a people problem and you've made the pile bigger, not smaller.

3. 03

   Supply the artefact, not the encouragement.

   For every job on the list, ask what document would make it take an hour instead of a fortnight, then build it once and reuse it — the business case with the arithmetic done, the pre-answered security pack, a one-page brief your champion can forward without editing, a rollout plan their operations lead can argue with. Forwardable unedited is the floor rather than the wish: the page has to cost your champion nothing to send on, and any edits it comes back with are better still, because they mean the argument has become theirs. CEB set three bars: it has to be credible rather than promotional, it has to narrow the choice and compel a decision, and it has to lead somewhere you are unusually good. The test is the reaction. Good prescription earns 'you've made my life easier', never 'I see what you're doing there'.

4. 04

   One plan, dated, held by both sides.

   Late in a complex purchase, CEB describe a staged plan of every action required from you and from them, built with their people rather than for them, carrying a date and an owner on each line and named points at which the customer can walk away. The exits are what make it signable; a plan that only ever locks them in reads as a closing device and gets quietly ignored. Once they've committed to it in writing, each completed step is hard evidence of where the purchase actually stands — a verifier, in CEB's language — so you stop having to ask how things are going.