This roadmap is optimized for B2B sales/business development/account executive / founder-led sales. It is deliberately execution-heavy: roughly 70% practice, 30% theory.
You should be able to take a hypothetical or real product/service and independently:
Choose an ICP → build an account list → research buyers → write relevant outreach → run discovery → qualify opportunities → quantify value → navigate multiple stakeholders → create a mutual action plan → handle objections → negotiate → close → forecast and document the deal.
What "Deal Creation" actually consists of
Think of the skill as a chain:
↓ Market understanding
↓ ICP
↓ Account selection
↓ Buyer identification
↓ Research
↓ Messaging
↓ Prospecting
↓ Conversation
↓ Discovery
↓ Qualification
↓ Pain / impact
↓ Value hypothesis
↓ Stakeholder alignment
↓ Business case
↓ Proposal
↓ Objection handling
↓ Negotiation
↓ Commitment
↓ Close
↓ Handoff / expansion
A weakness early in the chain propagates downstream.
For example:
Bad ICP → bad prospects → poor meetings → weak discovery → fake pipeline → desperate negotiation.
That is why this roadmap does not start with closing techniques.
PHASE 1 — Commercial Foundations
Imagine you sell a B2B software product that helps companies reduce the time their finance teams spend preparing reports.
Objective: Understand how a commercial opportunity moves from an unknown account to revenue.
12. Pipeline Economics & Metrics
The 12 topics teach you how this machine works.
B2B Sales Terminology
Objective: Become comfortable with basic commercial terminology.
Important terms.
- Account: The company or organization you're selling to.
- Contact: A person associated with an account.
- Lead: A person or organization that has entered your system
- Prospect: A lead that appears potentially relevant to your ICP and is worth pursuing.
- Opportunity: A prospect where you've identified enough evidence
- Customer: An organization that has actually purchased from you.
- Pipeline: The collection of active opportunities being pursued.
- Forecast: Your estimate of what revenue is likely to close within a particular period. [Pipeline ≠ forecast.]
- Conversion rate: The percentage of one stage that progresses to another.
- Sales cycle: The amount of time required to move an opportunity from a defined starting point to a closed deal.
- ACV / ARR / MRR /
If you don't understand the terminology, you can't understand what actually happened.
Lead vs Prospect vs Opportunity vs Customer
Now learn the journey of a potential customer.
This is more important than memorizing definitions. Think of it as a filtering system.
↓ LARGE UNIVERSE
↓ LEAD
↓ PROSPECT
↓ CONVERSATION
↓ QUALIFIED PROSPECT
↓ OPPORTUNITY↓ CUSTOMER
The key concept to learn
Not every prospect becomes an opportunity.
Sales Funnel vs Sales Pipeline
Now you need to understand how many opportunities you need to create revenue.
Sales funnel: The funnel describes the overall conversion process. It answers:
"What happens to prospects as they move through the sales process?"
Sales Pipeline: The pipeline describes the specific opportunities currently being worked.
These are individual deals.
Learn the distinction
- Funnel = population/conversion model
- Pipeline = current commercial opportunities
This distinction is fundamental.
ICP and Buyer Persona
Now you learn: Who should we sell to?
ICP = Ideal Customer Profile. It is about the organization. ICP answers:
Learn how to define the characteristics of your ideal company.
Buyer Persona. The buyer persona answers:
"Who inside that organization is involved in the problem and buying decision?"
For example: CFO, Finance Manager, IT, Procurement
ICP → account → persona → contact
Sales Stages
These concepts are related but not identical.
A sales stage describes where an opportunity is in the buying process.
↓ Prospecting
↓ First meeting
↓ Discovery
↓ Qualification
↓ Solution evaluation
↓ Proposal
↓ Negotiation
↓ Contract
↓ Closed Won/Lost
Learn:
What evidence must exist before an opportunity moves to the next stage?