Is your sales process equipped to support your sales team in scaling revenue growth? Are there red flag and gaps that may require a new approach to drive repeatable wins and high-value margins? If you want to grow your sales organization, you need a sales process that provides the tools to manage, reinforce and coach on every pipeline opportunity. Whether you want to increase your average sales price, improve the reliability of your forecast or increase your cross-sell opportunities – your sales process needs to align with your buyer and be consumable for your sales team.
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:
Align with their customers?
Articulate Value and Differentiation?
Forecast accurately?
Access and utilize assets, resources and people effectively and efficiently?
7. How does our CRM system facilitate the "selling in the process"?
8. What is the bigger picture of organizational, technological and process integration? Where are we in our ability to bring the various assets, resources, people and actions to bear in the buying & selling processes?
9. What is the case for dynamic or different sales processes?
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. True transformation is not an event. It’s a process. Create opportunities for your sellers to embrace the new approach. Remember these initiatives won’t deliver the results you need until they are adopted, not just within the sales organization, but across the entire enterprise.