Lead-to-cash assessment and action plan · Sales leadership
Give your teams more time to sell,
from lead to cash.
In four weeks, identify what takes time away from selling and which actions to prioritise. Aria gathers insights from your teams. Our partners cross-check findings and available data to build your action plan with estimated costs and benefits. We can also help you put it into practice.
4 weeks
From scoping to your action plan
The entire process
From prospecting to payment
Fixed fee
Agreed with the scope at the outset
Implementation
Support to put the plan into practice, if needed
01 — THE CHALLENGE
Your sales metrics show the results.
Your teams know what drives them.
Conversion rates, sales cycle length and time to payment: your dashboards measure how the lead-to-cash process is performing. The causes lie beneath those figures, in lead qualification, meeting preparation and handovers between sales, operations and billing.
This is where selling time is lost: entering the same data into different tools, repeating qualification because information is missing, and chasing approvals.
It is also where the strengths lie: practices that already work, solutions teams have found themselves and practical improvements no one has yet put forward.
02 — THE PROCESS
Six stages examined,
from lead to cash.
The assessment covers the entire revenue process, beyond the sales team alone. Across our engagements, most breakdowns occur at the same stages: where friction builds up and where there is room to improve.
Lead
Meeting
Contract
Cash
1
Lead qualification
When leads are not filtered at the outset, salespeople have to prospect, qualify and build confidence themselves. The assessment measures that workload and how much selling time a flow of qualified meetings could free up.
2
Sales commitments and delivery capacity
Salespeople make commitments based on the information they have; operations then has to deliver. The assessment clarifies what each team can and cannot see when a promise is made.
3
Variable pay
Part of a salesperson’s variable pay may depend on factors beyond their control. The assessment distinguishes those factors from what they can influence and documents the effect on engagement.
4
The customer relationship after signing
As roles become more specialised, customers can lose the contact who understood their whole situation. The assessment gathers teams’ observations of the customer experience and identifies handovers to improve.
5
Preparing proposals
A critical step often depends on one person. Individual excellence can hide a wider vulnerability. The assessment maps these single points of dependency and proposes ways to share the expertise.
6
From quote to cash
The final stage often takes the longest to turn into cash. The assessment measures the process, estimates the cost and identifies where rework occurs.
03 — IN PRACTICE
What an executive team discovers
in four weeks.
Three anonymised situations from our assessments. Sectors and figures have been changed; the underlying mechanisms are faithfully represented.
Approvals that grow with deal size
Each increase in deal value added another internal approval level to the quote. The more important the deal, the longer the response took. The most strategic proposals went out last, sometimes too late.
Making a crucial demonstration reliable
At a technical services provider, a demonstration under real operating conditions won the deal, but depended on one person. The assessment showed how to make this critical step reliable and transfer the expertise.
Cash held up internally
At a services company, some revenue was held up before collection, in the handover from quote to invoice. The assessment identified the bottleneck and the delay it caused.
04 — YOUR ACTION PLAN
Your plan to free up
selling time.
You get a shared understanding of the bottlenecks, their estimated costs and the actions to take. The plan identifies practices to preserve, priorities and decisions for the leadership team.
01
Where to free up selling time
The tasks and handovers that take time away from selling, with an estimate of the time that could be recovered and the assumptions to verify.
02
Which bottlenecks to address first
The causes of delays and rework, the teams affected and the estimated costs where the data allows them to be quantified.
03
How to get started
Workstreams ranked by priority, their launch order, the owners to appoint, the resources to plan for and the measures to track their effects.
05 — OUR APPROACH
Four weeks.
Input from across the entire process.
The Spentia method, applied to revenue operations: we invite input from salespeople and every function that supports or follows their work.
Week 01
Scope
Together, we define the process to cover, from lead generation to payment, and the decisions to make. Roles, scope and data are agreed at the outset.
Week 02
Listen
Everyone within scope is invited to an individual, confidential interview with Aria. Teams describe the situations that make their work easier or harder.
Week 03
Analyse
Findings are cross-checked and symptoms linked to their causes. Each point of friction is quantified in terms of the selling and service time it consumes.
Week 04
Decide
The findings session brings the leadership team together around your action plan. You get priorities, a launch sequence and an initial estimate of the resources required. We also identify the support that would help with implementation.
06 — WHO IT IS FOR
Four leadership teams,
one shared assessment.
Sales leadership
Identify what takes time away from selling and the actions to prioritise, in coordination with the other functions involved.
Executive leadership
Get a plan shared across functions to improve sales performance and decide which resources to commit.
Growth leadership
Identify where prospects are lost between lead generation, qualification and signing, and which handovers need improvement.
Marketing leadership
Build a shared view with sales of incoming leads, how they are handled and how qualification can improve.
07 — FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What leaders ask us.
Will teams feel they are being checked up on?
Will teams feel they are being checked up on?
No, and that is a condition of the method. Interviews are individual, confidential and anonymous. Neither executives nor managers can access individual responses. The findings focus on the system—processes, handovers and tools—never on individuals. The report opens with the organisation’s strengths.
Our salespeople will not have time.
Our salespeople will not have time.
Allow around 30 minutes per person, with no travel required. We agree the interview schedule during scoping to fit around the teams’ work. Participants can expand on the situations they consider useful. Actual participation is reported in the findings.
We already know what our problems are.
We already know what our problems are.
You know the symptoms: conversion rates, sales cycle length and tension between departments. The assessment quantifies them, traces their causes and sets priorities. Sometimes teams’ insights confirm the expected priority; sometimes they change it.
Our CRM already measures sales activity.
Our CRM already measures sales activity.
The CRM records what people enter into it. Some friction lies precisely in what is left out: duplicate data entry, follow-ups outside the system and work waiting between two tools. Teams’ insights complement activity data; they do not replace it.
