Read this first. If you already have a sales process built, you can skip ahead to the next guide in our series, How to Implement a Sales Process. Each stage consists of tasks , which are the key activities your team must perform in order to advance the sale from stage to stage.
Your reps likely have a general outline of sales activities that they follow for each sale, including commitments that they have to secure along the way from their prospects. The first step in building a sales process is gaining a full understanding of what your sales team is currently doing to turn leads into customers. What is the first thing that your sales reps do to connect with a potential buyer, and what is the last thing they do to finish the sale?
With those end-points in mind, you can begin to fill in the blanks. To help with this process, take a handful of your recent leads and go through the following questions with your reps. Their answers will help you understand the specific activities that your team is currently performing during the course of a sale. After making contact with a lead, what questions did the sales rep or sales development rep SDR ask in the initial conversation?
If the lead was won and the sale was completed, what did your first post-sale contact with the customer look like? Also known as lead generation, prospecting involves identifying potential buyers to add to the top of your sales funnel. Prospecting is often done through online research, buying lead lists, or inbound marketing methods.
The presentation step is typically when your salesperson runs a formal product or service demonstration for your prospect. This step is time-consuming, so it typically comes later in the sales process and is reserved for more qualified prospects — which is why the connecting and qualifying step is so critical.
You don't want a sales rep wasting any of their valuable time if it's avoidable. Tailor each presentation to meet the specific prospect's unique use case and pain points. Additionally, a rep might bring an engineer or executive to the meeting with them to demonstrate the level of service the customer will receive when doing business with your company.
This also allows them to answer more technical questions the rep might not be best suited to answer. It's not uncommon for prospects to have objections to your salesperson's presentation and proposal. In fact, it's expected — which is why this is a specific step in the sales process. Your sales team should be prepared to handle any and all objections.
Listening to your prospect's objections and questions can help your reps better tailor your product to fit their needs. Through their research and presentation preparation, reps should identify and anticipate possible objections, whether about cost, onboarding, or other parts of the proposed contract. This step of the sales process refers to any late-stage activities that happen as a deal approaches closing.
It varies widely from company to company and may include delivering a quote or proposal, negotiation, or achieving the buy-in of decision-makers.
Closing a sale is what every salesperson wants to achieve. It should result in a mutually beneficial, contractual agreement between the prospect and the seller. Once a deal closes, the salesperson receives a commission on the price they negotiated with the customer, and the account usually passes to an account manager or customer success representative. Although closing deals is the ultimate goal in sales, it's not where sales reps stop working with customers.
Not only should reps confirm that customers receive what they've purchased, but they should also play a part in transitioning customers to whichever team is responsible for onboarding and customer success. The final step of the sales process also involves continuing to communicate and reinforce value to customers. This can provide opportunities to upsell and cross-sell , as well as opportunities to get secure referrals from delighted customers. These best practices will help you improve the impact of your sales process across your team and customer base.
Consider what is and isn't working for your sales reps to tailor your new process to fit their needs better, as it will help close more deals and delight more customers. One way to analyze the success of your current sales process is to observe reps as they work through the process. Look back at the last five or ten deals you closed. What did these deals look like from beginning to end?
What were the touchpoints with the customer? Consider roughly how long the entire process took and how much time elapsed between each step. The more examples you have and the more people on your team those examples come from , the better. Once you've outlined that timeline, work backward to understand the timeframe for each deal.
For example, if six of those ten deals closed in approximately six weeks, take a look at the average steps to get there during that period.
You can also dig a bit deeper to understand the subtle motivations and pain points that drove each deal to close. Outline the buyer's journey for your target audience or your buyer personas. This will allow you to look at your sales process from the perspective of your customers.
You'll be able to get a better understanding of the interactions they have with your reps, the pain points they experience, and the reasons they need your product or service. When you outline the buyer's journey for your target persona, you'll gain insight into how you can tailor your sales process to ensure your team has everything they need to build strong relationships with prospects and close more deals.
You should understand what causes a prospect to move from one stage to the next in your sales process. Ideally, the reason or cause will be based on the prospect's actions, not the perception of the sales rep. Define the exit criteria for each step of the sales process for your team. This means you should identify the things that need to happen for your prospects to move from one step of your sales process to the next.
You can refer to the sales process steps and the buyer's journey as mentioned above to get started with this.
For example, suppose you're working through the "presenting" step. In that case, your reps might determine they need a specific type of content — such as customer testimonial videos — to share with your prospects to move them to "closing. When determining exit criteria for each step of the sales process, consider the following questions to ensure all of your reps have the same information.
Your sales process will evolve as your team finds ways to work more efficiently and move prospects through your pipeline faster.
For example, note how many prospects transitioned in and out of each step of the sales process over a given period. These are the basic metrics most teams find value in measuring. Give some thought to metrics specific to your business that will help you define success or the need for improvement in a particular step. Another great way to measure your results is with the three levels of sales process success. Determining which level of success you're in will provide you with more insight into what you need to fine-tune for your team and prospects regarding your sales process.
This is also when all of your new hires are being ramped up quickly to target performance, and your team isn't providing you with any negative feedback about the sales process.
Experimenting is when your sales process isn't quite humming, so your team is experimenting and testing different tactics to determine what's most effective. For example, a team might be experimenting with different modes of contact in the "connecting" step of the sales process to get sales discussions going with prospects. They can test whether or not their prospects respond best to a specific email template when starting a discussion with a rep.
Thrashing is when a team is rapidly moving from one solution to another within a specific sales process. Thrashing is ineffective and something you'll want to ensure your team gets out of as quickly as possible if you're ever experiencing it. Sales teams should be cognizant of specific information they are responsible for gathering to maintain and update the sales manual. For more on this topic, see: Sales Manuals. What is a Sales Manual?
This is a living document that has to work. Easily accessed. Readily available. But great sales reps can make or break a company.
The company that keeps its sales force informed and supplied with every resource it needs to do the job well will flourish. One very important resource is the sales manual. Ask your design team, desktop publishing guru or clerical workers who have a flair for creative projects to come up with a format for the manual.
Ask them to choose signature colors, fonts and formatting styles that will give your presentation a uniform, professional look with content ranging from data to graphs, charts and other visual aids.
Consider using a system of color-coded sections. For example, new product line introductions for the coming year might be confined to a red section with page numbers starting at 1R.
Start a yellow section on pricing with 1Y. Give one person the responsibility for editing the content of the sales material.
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