Raimo Jalonen has led sales in twelve businesses over thirty years. He says the companies that grow build the process first, then hire people into it.
Over my career, I have made more than a thousand sales calls and customer visits. In my teams, we worked with a rule of 15 sales impacts per week, because activity is the part of sales a team can measure and control.
When Raimo joined me for the latest episode of The Builders of Modern Medicine, he approached the same logic from a different angle. After three decades leading sales organizations, he has spent the last five years advising companies on how to sell clearly and systematically.
Raimo describes two philosophies. Some companies hire the strongest salespeople they can find, train them, and trust each one to work in their own style. Others define a common way of working and back every rep with strong support. He favors the second approach and pointed to analyst research showing it produces better results. The support he has in mind is practical: a script for the first phone call, slides for the next presentation, business case calculations, offer templates, contracts, and a sales process built around the way the customer buys.
“If you sell it the way the customer wants to buy, you’re closer to the deal,” said Raimo. The logic lies in the support itself. When every rep sells differently, the company cannot build tools that serve them all. Shared tools require a shared method.
Raimo estimates that without a system, a new rep may need two years to become profitable. A defined process shortens that considerably. Forecasting also becomes more reliable, since people working the same way produce comparable results, and the sales manager no longer has to adjust for the optimists and pessimists on the team.
In the earliest stage of a company, none of this exists yet. The knowledge sits in the founder’s head, and the founder closes the first deals. Raimo considers that the right starting point, provided the system is in place before the company begins hiring a sales force. His framework starts with a written sales strategy that answers three questions: what the company sells and what problem it solves, who it sells to, and how it sells. In his view, the board should approve it, management should prepare it, and the sales team should carry it out.
From there, he advises startups to begin with a single segment. The right one combines the customers who gain the most value from the product with those the company can realistically reach through its existing relationships. Spreading a small team across several segments at once weakens every effort.
The first deal itself should be easy to buy. The customer needs to understand what they are getting, what it costs, and when it will arrive. Raimo recommends keeping delivery simple enough that it cannot fail, reducing customer risk through a trial period or money-back guarantee, and pricing the first order low enough to secure references.
Raimo explains that targets and results are lagging indicators. They describe what has already happened. He focuses instead on leading indicators, the steps before the order: whether the customer matches the ideal profile, whether the business case shows a return above fifty percent, and whether the presentation reached the management team or only the buyer. A CRM that holds the sales process reveals where a deal went off course. “If you only have the targets and results in your hand, the only advice you can give is to sell more”. That advice leaves a rep with nothing to act on.
A manager who can see the skipped meeting or the missing business case has something concrete to coach.
We also discussed raising the opportunity win rate from 30 to 50 percent. In the same pipeline, two additional opportunities out of every ten become orders. According to Raimo, most companies fall short because they move too quickly. They talk to anyone who will listen, haven't established the product's value to the customer, and end up investing time in customers who will never buy.
His starting point is financial. If the product costs 100 and the customer gains 200, the purchase makes sense. A seller also needs to understand the buying process, since the buyer may make this kind of purchase once in a career and needs support at every stage, from budget approval to regulatory requirements.
In diagnostics, the consequences extend beyond revenue. A test the market never buys never reaches a patient. One practical test for any leadership team: ask the sales manager what the team did last month before a customer signed. If the answer is a revenue figure, the team is being managed on lagging indicators.
We closed the conversation on AI, which Raimo notes now comes up in every sales meeting. In his view, it rests on the same foundation as a well-run sales team. Customer data must remain secure and GDPR-compliant, and the company needs sales master data that documents its strategy, products, brand, and process. A playbook reduced to two slides gives AI nothing to work with, so it looks for answers in other companies’ material.
A company that documents how it sells can hand that knowledge to a new rep and an AI system. A company where the process lives in the founder’s head will struggle with both.
Kauko Väinämö
Kauko Väinämö is CEO of Ginolis, a precision automation company for microfluidics and diagnostics manufacturing based in Oulu, Finland, with over 150 production lines across 37 countries.