A sale, like any other endeavor has key milestones that can be used to judge progress and to measure effectiveness along the way.  At ShadeTree, we call these milestones "inflection" points.  Identifying your organization's key inflection points and measuring performance of your sales team to convert opportunities along to the next point/step is an important step in achieving a repeatable, successful selling process.   

Many sales managers have an intuitive sense about their unique inflection points.  More formalized selling organizations measure, report and manage to success at each point along the path to deal closure.  Identifying your organization's key sales inflection points is one of the first steps in moving from an ad-hoc or informal selling process to a more mature and managed sales process.   

Examples of inflection points in a sale are: