Categories: Sales Process
Efficiency and alignment are critical elements of sales productivity. An effective sales process provides a vehicle to enforce discipline, repeatability, predictability and validation of progress through a sale. Most importantly, an effective sales process allows for inspection and planning – in advance.
Think about your current sales process. Ask yourself these questions:
How does your sales process help you differentiate in the marketplace?
How do you ensure that your teams are leveraging the best assets and resources per deal stage?
How do you get visibility into the adoption of your sales process through analytics?
Is your sales process providing you the tools you need to grow your sales organization?
If you’re struggling to answer any of these questions, your sales process likely needs improving. Below are four key things every sales process should do. Use the list to determine where you may need to improve.
1. Align your sales team’s actions with your buyers
An effective sales process maps to and facilitates your customers’ buying processes. A common mistake is to assume that one process fits all. Your market likely has different segments of buyers. These segments have different needs. Some have regimented buying processes, while others may be less refined; all have their own key decision criteria. Your sales process needs to adjust for these different buyers.
B2B solutions typically involve two major phases of the seller-buyer relationship:
- Before they do business with you, they are considering whether to do anything and why with you or someone else.
- After doing business with you, they’re considering if and why they need support, or renewal and expansion of the service.
If you take a one-process-fits-all approach, you aren’t accounting for the different buyer scenarios and your sales process may unintentionally weed out real opportunities.
2. Facilitate advancement of the sale
All too often, a sales process is developed and implemented as a required set of steps to get an order placed. These steps are necessary, but if this is the sole criteria for your sales process – it’s falling short. Enterprise sales campaigns require strategy that addresses key economic, political, operational and competitive landscapes.
The sales process must support advancing the sale in a way that assures your organization is more competitive and more likely to win. Every department in your organization has some part to play in selling and delivering value for your customers. Your sales process must facilitate the efficient coordination of people, resources, and activities, from those organizations with your sellers, when they need them.
3. Embed sales best practices
Your most productive sellers and managers conduct their business very effectively and routinely do the right things to sell more and create more value for their customers. Get these bright spots or best practices into your sales process. “Verifiable outcomes” is a good example of using best practices in a sales process. What verifiable outcomes or tangible steps have the buyer taken? These steps accurately indicate whether the buyer is progressing with the seller through the process. If you as a sales manager have a way to inspect these effectively and your sellers verify them, the sales process will help improve your deal qualification and improve your forecasting accuracy.
Doing something is obvious – doing the right something is crucial to better decisions, lower risk, higher win rates, and more efficiency. Best practices guide us in doing the right something. When it comes to your sales process, best practices and verifiable outcomes help you determine what the next step should be.
4. Empower managers to coach and collaborate
Empowering managers to coach and collaborate is a requirement for an effective and dynamic sales process. Think of great baseball managers managing a baseball game or a playoff series. A well-defined sales process will provide the manager with many opportunities to collaborate and enhance any particular sales campaign. Leverage the process with guidelines for how to use it and encourage sales managers to have a world series play-off mind-set of finding ways to leverage the organization while helping their sales people be more competitive, qualify better and productively win the right sales campaigns.
Dan Dawson is a Senior Partner with Force Management. His background includes more than 25 years of sales and sales management experience. Dan specializes in sales management consulting, helping Force's clients drive adoption and reinforcement of change initiatives.
