More than half of salespeople miss their targets
The lack of a sales process is a silent destroyer of results. Revial's data from encounters with 460 sales professionals shows that sales process challenges are the most common pain point with 594 mentions. The number is significant, but what lies behind it is even more interesting. Manual work is a concrete and measurable problem. The absence of a sales process is slower to surface, because it does not appear in a single meeting but accumulates quietly across the entire organization's performance, quarter after quarter.
2,376 mentions from 460 professionals: sales process challenges are the most common pain point in Finnish B2B sales, alongside manual work. Only 37 percent of companies have a functioning, organization-wide sales process in place.
Only 37 percent have a shared sales process
More than half of salespeople miss their annual sales targets. Research data repeats this finding regardless of industry or country, and yet it has somehow become normalized as part of the basic reality of sales, as if it were inevitable. Only 37 percent of companies have a formal, collectively adopted sales process in place. The rest operate in a situation where each salesperson builds their own version of how deals are done, which questions to use for discovery and how objections are handled.
Revial's data confirms that in the Finnish context, the phenomenon boils down to three recurring themes: salespeople each operate in their own way without a shared structure, needs discovery remains superficial and management has no visibility into whether the agreed approach is actually being followed in practice.
The majority of sales results come from a small fraction of the team. The reason is most often that the best performers have internalized a process, while the rest have not.
Incomplete data blinds leadership
When a shared sales process is missing, every salesperson develops their own operating model based on experience and intuition. A new salesperson cannot ramp up quickly because there is nothing compiled to learn from; instead, knowledge is scattered across colleagues' heads and memories accumulated over years. When a deal is lost, the real reason remains unclear because there is no process data. The kind of data on which analysis could actually be built. The best performers' methods do not transfer to others because they have never been captured in a form that would even make transfer possible.
Research shows that 84 percent of sales training content is forgotten within three months without repeated, everyday reinforcement. One-off training events, no matter how well designed, do not change habits on their own. Learning happens through repetition, and repetition requires a living structure, not a PDF folder.
A playbook goes unused for three reasons
In many organizations, a sales process exists but only on paper. It has been carefully drafted, presented at the kickoff and saved to a shared folder. After that, it has stayed there living its own life, disconnected from the daily reality it was supposed to guide.
The first reason is that the process is not tied to actual interactions. It is a guideline that is read before a meeting or during training, but it does not guide the salesperson in real time at the moment the customer is sitting across the table.
The second reason is the lack of visibility for leadership: a manager cannot see whether a salesperson is following the process unless they sit in on the meeting, which is rarely possible. Let alone a trust-building way to lead.
The third reason is that processes become outdated: guidelines are updated slowly, so salespeople quickly learn not to rely on them.
The result is an organization that formally has a process but in practice has a culture where everyone navigates by their own compass. Good salespeople succeed regardless, and the gap grows.
The most advanced sales organizations have solved this with one structural change: the playbook is embedded directly into interactions, so it is no longer a separate document but part of every sales moment. Before a meeting, the salesperson receives a structured question framework tailored to the specific customer profile and sales stage, so discovery does not depend on intuition alone. After the meeting, management sees as qualitative data whether the process was followed or not, without manual tracking.
Revial builds a tailored question framework into every meeting based on the customer profile and sales stage, guides the salesperson during the interaction and produces a post-meeting summary where management can see not only what was agreed, but also how discovery progressed and where the process was deviated from. The playbook becomes a living learning structure that evolves with every interaction rather than gathering dust in a folder.
The gap between leadership's perception and field reality
It is easy to overestimate the effectiveness of a sales process from the inside. Management sees the process as it was designed. But salespeople live with it as it actually plays out. The gap between the two is considerably wider in most organizations than leadership realizes, and it will not close by adding more training if the structure stays the same.
A practical test is simple: if you listened to ten different salespeople in ten different meetings, would you hear the same structure, the same questions, the same way of moving the conversation forward? If the answer is uncertain, the process is not working the way it was intended to. The absence of a sales process does not scream. It accumulates quietly quarter by quarter, until you look back and wonder why so few even among your best salespeople actually hit their targets.
Next in the series: Data management and analytics.