If your organization is struggling with long sales cycles and an unreliable sales forecast, it’s likely you need to tweak your sales execution. When organizations need to improve their sales process, they’re often experiencing problems like:
- misalignment with the buying process
- inconsistent opportunity qualification criteria
- reps taking shortcuts during the sales process
- frequent losses to “no decision”
The first step towards improving your sales process is to assess where you are now. Here‘s a list of questions to ask about your organization. Use the answers to start a path towards sales process success:
1. How hard or easy are we to buy from?
2. How hard or easy do we want to be to buy from – and why?
3. What do customers say about this and how we sell?
4. What do our sales people say about how our sales process supports their selling effectiveness?
5. How do our best performers sell? What are the best practices?
6. How does our sales process direct and empower our sellers to:
a. align with their customers?
b. articulate value and differentiation?
c. forecast accurately?
d. access and utilize assets, resources and people effectively and efficiently?
7. How does our CRM system facilitate "selling in the process"?
8. How do we bring together the various assets, resources, people and actions to bear in the buying & selling processes?
9. What is the case for a different sales process?
10. How do our demand generation, inside sales, service renewal, channel, government, consumer, retail, commercial and enterprise sales teams relate to their clients?
Work back from what’s most important to your customer and you’ll improve deal velocity, qualify your deals with more predictability and most importantly, develop a system your sellers will use effectively.
If you really want to drive change with an improved sales process, you need to focus on the execution of it with your sales team. Qualifying and advancing leads requires your processes to be well-defined and consistently reinforced.
