Sales process audits

You review a small B2B company’s pipeline, CRM data, and sales calls over 2 to 4 weeks and hand the founder a ranked plan to fix where deals stall.

Who pays
Founders and first sales leaders at B2B companies
Typical price
From $5,000 per audit
Start-up cost (estimate)
Under $1,500
Time to first offer (estimate)
2 to 3 weeks
■The problem

See the problem this business solves.

In small B2B companies, deals sit in the same stage for weeks, forecasts miss, and nobody can explain why. Salesforce surveyed 7,775 sales professionals and found reps spend 28% of their week selling, with the rest going to admin and deal management. Only 17% expected their teams to hit full quota that year.

Founders often built the process by feel and hired reps who each sell their own way. The CRM holds partial data, and everyone is too busy chasing this quarter’s number to step back and diagnose the system. A full-time sales operations hire is a big commitment for a company this size.

■How it works

Follow the 3 steps from first call to paid work.

01

Discovery

You run a 30 minute call to learn the sales motion, team size, and the metric that worries the founder most.

02

Proposal

You send a fixed-fee proposal covering a CRM review, call reviews, rep interviews, and a 90 day fix plan.

03

Access

You collect a deposit and read-only CRM access, then start rep interviews in week 1.

■Who buys

Know who pays and why they say yes.

The buyer

Founder, CEO, or VP of Sales

They carry the revenue target and see the missed forecasts first.

The budget

Sales or revenue operations budget

A fixed audit fee is small next to the salary of 1 underperforming rep, which makes the case easy to explain.

What buyers pay: Fixed-fee audits list at $5,000 (RevOps HQ) and from £8,000 (RevOps Consulting, UK); Upwork lists advanced sales consultants at $88 an hour.

Where to meet them

B2B companies with roughly 2 to 15 sellers

They have enough deal history to analyze and no dedicated team to study it.

■First clients

Find your first 3 clients here.

There are 4 places to start, in the order most people find their first buyers.

1

Own network

Contact former colleagues, customers, and partners who have moved into founder or sales leader roles.

2

Referral partners

Partner with fractional CFOs, CRM implementers, and sales recruiters who spot broken pipelines early.

3

Events and associations

Speak at founder groups, chambers of commerce, or trade associations about why small-team forecasts miss.

4

Content

Share anonymized pipeline teardowns and short audit checklists on LinkedIn.

■Risks

Check what could stop this business.

Every idea has weak spots. These are the ones to test before you spend money.

Define the audit as diagnosis plus a written plan and offer implementation as a separate paid phase.

Add call recordings and rep interviews to the scope so your findings rest on more than the CRM.

Tell the team you are reviewing the process, keep individual comments anonymous, and report themes.

Center your audit on selling behavior, deal reviews, and stage definitions that tool audits leave out.

■Related

Compare it with ideas from the same careers.

Starts from this career

Marketing and sales

Brand positioning sprints

Finance

Fractional FP&A for software companies

Legal

Contract playbooks for startups

■Sources

Check the numbers behind this idea.

■Free live training, once a month

Test this idea against your own career at The Shortlist.

You bring your career history. You leave with 3 candidate directions of your own and the 4 tests that cut them down to one.

Ask us anything.

Questions about the toolkits, Plan A, mentorship, or whether any of this fits where you are right now. Send it here and a real person answers, usually within a day.

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