Often in industry we find that sales has not fully transferred customer requirements to design engineering and manufacturing. The seven steps apply to services and to physical goods. Providing a service is just as much a deliverable as making hard goods. A company that contracts to mow your lawn and trim your shrubs has to go through the same logic as one that is selling you a refrigerator. Salespeople have to determine what the customer wants, then transfer the information to the design team, which figures out how to create it.
Sales has to be very careful to fully understand the true needs of the customer.
Sometimes this is easy, if the business is one where the customer comes to you. Sometimes this is difficult, because customers do not know what they want until the new product is a reality. Often we think we see a product created, then a market created for it. In reality, marketing and sales discern what the customer wants by focusing on future desires. At a minimum, they use some form of concurrent engineering team formed from all functions of the company to usher products from conception to distribution.