26Point Checklist

The framework · Customers & Growth

10 Sales System

11 sub-categories. The three numbers on each are the typical opportunity in that area across businesses — not your result.

Time8.0/10Financial8.2/10Automation9.1/10

These three numbers are researched cross-business benchmarks for the area — the typical opportunity available in it. They are not your score, not a forecast, and not a promise. What is actually critical depends on your business, which is what the audit is for.

10.1

Lead handling

Time9/10Financial8/10Automation10/10
What this is
What happens to an enquiry between arriving and being spoken to.
Why it matters
Nine out of ten for time and ten for automation. Speed of first response is one of the most reliably decisive factors in whether a lead converts, and it is almost entirely a systems problem.
You have a problem here if
Enquiries received in the evening are answered the following afternoon.
What to automate
Fully automatable and should be: instant acknowledgement, immediate routing to a person, self-service booking, and an alert if nothing has happened within a set window. This is usually the single highest-return automation in a small business.
10.2

Qualification

Time8/10Financial8/10Automation9/10
What this is
Deciding early which enquiries are worth pursuing and which are not.
Why it matters
Unqualified pipeline consumes the most expensive resource in the business. Qualification protects both the sales time and the delivery capacity behind it.
You have a problem here if
Your team spends significant time on deals that were never going to close.
What to automate
Automate the gathering: qualifying questions in the enquiry form, enrichment from public data, and scoring against your ideal-customer criteria. The disqualification decision should be a human confirming an obvious answer, not discovering it in week three.
10.3

Sales process

Time8/10Financial10/10Automation8/10
What this is
The defined stages every deal passes through, and what must be true to advance.
Why it matters
Ten out of ten financially. A defined process is what makes sales performance improvable, teachable and transferable off the owner.
You have a problem here if
Two salespeople describe the process differently, or the only process is "call them back".
What to automate
Encode the stages in the CRM with required fields and exit criteria, and automate the prompts at each step. The process design is human; the enforcement should not depend on memory.
10.4

Follow-up

Time10/10Financial9/10Automation10/10
What this is
The contact that happens after the first conversation and before the decision.
Why it matters
The highest time-leverage line in the entire framework, at ten out of ten. Most lost deals are not lost to competitors — they are lost to silence after contact two.
You have a problem here if
You have quotes outstanding that nobody has chased.
What to automate
Automate ruthlessly: sequenced follow-up with real content, task creation for personal contact, and escalation when a deal goes quiet. Keep the messages specific to the deal — a generic drip sequence on a considered purchase reads as indifference.
10.5

Pipeline management

Time8/10Financial8/10Automation10/10
What this is
Knowing every open opportunity, its value, stage and next action.
Why it matters
Pipeline is the only forward-looking view of revenue a business has. Without it, capacity, cash and hiring are all planned in the rear-view mirror.
You have a problem here if
Your pipeline lives in someone's head or in a spreadsheet only they update.
What to automate
High automation potential. One CRM as the single record, automated stage ageing, next-action prompts, and a weekly pipeline report generated rather than assembled.
10.6

Proposal/quotation process

Time9/10Financial7/10Automation10/10
What this is
Producing, pricing and issuing quotes and proposals, and how long that takes.
Why it matters
Nine for time, ten for automation — one of the largest recoverable time sinks in small business. Quote turnaround also correlates strongly with win rate.
You have a problem here if
A proposal takes hours to produce and is largely copied from the last one.
What to automate
Almost fully automatable: templated documents populated from CRM data, priced from a rules-based catalogue, e-signature, and automatic follow-up. Reserve human effort for the parts that are genuinely bespoke.
10.7

Conversion

Time6/10Financial10/10Automation8/10
What this is
The proportion of qualified opportunities that become customers.
Why it matters
Ten out of ten financially. Conversion improvement is free growth — it uses the leads you already paid for.
You have a problem here if
You do not know your win rate, or you know it only in aggregate.
What to automate
Automated conversion reporting by stage, source, salesperson and segment. The value is in the breakdown: aggregate win rate hides the specific place the process is failing.
10.8

Sales cycle

Time7/10Financial8/10Automation8/10
What this is
How long a deal takes from first contact to signature.
Why it matters
Cycle length drives cash flow and forecast accuracy, and it compounds: halving the cycle roughly doubles what the same team can process.
You have a problem here if
You cannot say what a normal sales cycle looks like, so you cannot tell when one has stalled.
What to automate
Timestamp every stage automatically and report cycle length by segment, with stalled-deal alerts. Removing waiting time — for a quote, a callback, a document — is usually where the cycle shortens.
10.9

CRM/customer records

Time9/10Financial7/10Automation10/10
What this is
One reliable record of every customer and prospect interaction.
Why it matters
Nine for time, ten for automation. The CRM is the substrate everything else in this category runs on; without it, sales knowledge lives in individuals and leaves when they do.
You have a problem here if
Customer history is reconstructed from email inboxes.
What to automate
Automate capture rather than relying on discipline: email and calendar sync, call logging, form submissions writing directly to the record. A CRM that requires manual data entry will be incomplete within a month.
10.10

Forecasting

Time7/10Financial7/10Automation9/10
What this is
Predicting what will close and when, with enough accuracy to plan against.
Why it matters
Forecasts drive hiring, purchasing and cash decisions. A bad forecast is worse than none, because it is acted upon.
You have a problem here if
Forecasting is a number the owner feels is about right.
What to automate
High automation potential: weighted pipeline value, historical conversion rates by stage, and variance reporting against previous forecasts so the forecast itself improves. Keep a human adjustment step — models miss the deal you know is dead.
10.11

Sales performance

Time7/10Financial8/10Automation8/10
What this is
How sales activity and outcomes are measured at individual and team level.
Why it matters
Measuring only outcomes tells you the result too late. Measuring activity alongside it tells you why, in time to change something.
You have a problem here if
Sales performance is reviewed only when the monthly number disappoints.
What to automate
Automated dashboards covering activity, pipeline created, conversion and revenue per person. Set the targets by judgement; let the reporting run itself.

Category totals

Time 88/110 · Financial 90/110 · Automation 100/110. The sum is the official roll-up; the averages above exist so categories of different sizes can be compared.