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When it comes to sales, we all know two key things –
However, what many of us may not know is that salespeople also need a proper structure and roadmap to succeed. They also need reference points to feel empowered and sell with confidence. And if sales teams don’t feel empowered, this can hamper your business’ sales performance.
This is why a sales process holds value.
Having a sales process with well-defined steps can add structure to your sales engagement and sales activities. It will add a standardized flow to your sales cycle. Your sales team will become organized, resulting in better conversion.
In this blog, we will discuss the sales process in detail, understand the various stages, learn how to devise it for your business and know how to improve it.
Before we dig deeper, let’s first understand the definition and meaning…
The sales process is a defined series of steps to convert prospects into paying customers. It acts as a detailed guide for sales teams to close and convert a deal.
The sales process is also a structured framework for increasing sales efficiency and improving profit margins. It has different stages that provide a direction to the sales team to move prospects.
In addition, this process ensures a systematic approach to closing deals by effectively meeting customer needs. There are well-defined steps in the sales process that help sales teams understand how to keep customer relationships strong and alive.
Sales is a challenging job. Challenges multiply when the sales team has no framework to work with. This limits their effectiveness to a great extent. With no guidance to follow, sales reps may have to rely on experience to convert prospects into customers.
What if a business does not have an experienced and adept sales team? It will have to face missed opportunities. Not having a proper framework for selling means sales reps are not sure what exact process to follow. It becomes like shooting in the dark.
When there is no sales process –
On the other hand, when the sales team has a roadmap to follow, they know the steps and directions to take.
With a proper roadmap in hand, your sales team may understand all the required actions to convert potential leads into loyal customers.
With a map to follow, even inexperienced sales reps can quickly understand the best practices and learn to handle various stages of the sales cycle.
A well-designed sales process can help salespeople –
A sales team performs better and achieves more when it has a proper guideline to follow. When the process is already defined, sales reps tend to close deals more successfully. There are more reasons why a process is important for the sales team, including –
Make the Sales Hassle-Free – Sales can be complicated if done without a clear roadmap. It can lead to wasted efforts and missed opportunities. Salespeople however can perform better when then there are well-defined rules to follow. It will help them understand every aspect throughout the sales journey – starting from the prospecting to the conversion and beyond. A clear process for sales helps the sales team understand where the buyers are in the sales cycle and what they expect.
Ease of Tracking Performance – Most businesses that don’t have a proper sales structure in place fail to understand what went wrong and where. They can also not track anything beyond the total number of deals closed and their value. On the other hand, following a selling process means you can track and measure your sales team’s performance at every stage of the sales cycle.
Better Understanding of Prospects – Salespeople who follow a defined process add great value to not only sales teams but also to prospects. They often research a lot about prospects, try to understand their prospects and their needs better, and take steps to meet those needs. More so, the sales team that follows a structured approach will often outline buyer personas and customer profiles before approaching prospects directly. This increases the chances of conversion as well.
Identify Risks and Opportunities – Following a standard process for selling ensures that sales efforts go in the right direction. It is also helpful for quickly identifying risks and opportunities and doing away with the activities that are least likely to add desired sales value. When the sales team follows the process, they easily know the reasons why deals get stuck, or what prospects exactly need at each stage of the buying cycle.
Facilitate Smooth Onboarding – Coaching and training new sales reps is easier when there is already a guideline in place for selling. It also helps less experienced reps quickly get through the tricks of the trade and understand how the sales things work at your organization. Sales managers can use the process to teach reps about what they need to do at each stage in a sales cycle.
More Clarity on Revenue Generation – A certain degree of predictability is essential for revenue generation. Having an accurate view of the revenue at the end of a sales cycle can prepare a business better to deal with operational challenges. Establishing a sales framework means you can keep track of the prospects in your pipeline at any point in time, resulting in a clearer view of the expected revenue for the specific sales period.
Accommodate Customer Experience – Salespeople are always eager, sometimes impulsive, and forever ultra-excited to close deals. This attitude often does not sit well with those prospects who take time to move through the sales funnel and may not be ready for the next step yet. Sometimes this eagerness may cause the deal to drop. Such problems don’t happen when sales reps follow a proper process as then they understand the buying steps and also keep the process aligned with buyer needs and behavior.
“40% of salespeople find prospecting the most challenging aspect of a sales process. ( Source – Salesmate.io)
Prospecting is the first step in the sales process. It involves finding new leads or prospects for the business. This step is very important as it sets the tone for the rest of the steps of the process.
At this stage, you need to determine whether your potential client has a particular need that you can fulfill. Among other things, you may also need to establish whether the prospect can afford what you offer.
In the prospecting stage, you will need in-depth research to identify your ideal customer. Once the potential leads are identified, you can compile a list and then screen them based on qualifying questions.
At this stage, you can –
“67% of sales are lost due to sales reps not properly qualifying their potential customers. ( Source – Business2Community.Com)..
The qualification stage is the next step in the sales process where your focus will be on discovering more about prospects through qualifying questions. It will also be the first time or step when your reps make direct contact with a potential client. The purpose of connecting with the lead is to find out whether they are an ideal suit for your product or service.
In the qualification stage, you should rely on the BANT framework ( Budget, Authority, Need, and Timelines) and determine four key things –
Need– Does the lead want what you offer
Budget – Does the lead have the resources or money to buy what you offer
Authority – Does the lead have the decision-making power to buy from you
Timeline – Does the lead have a specific timeline in mind to buy from you soon
Apart from using the above qualification questions, you’d certainly want to dig deeper and understand your potential clients better. There’s plenty more you can research about the prospect, including –
Selling is not easy in today’s competitive market. If you want to sell, you first need to form a connection with customers. Forming a connection means you need to get leads emotionally connected with your story, brand, or offer. This can’t happen unless you build personal relationships with your leads.
The more you get leads emotionally invested, the better chances of conversion you will have. The key is to find ways to offer value to them that fixes their pain points. It’s also about developing a personal rapport and treating them like friends.
To develop relationships with leads, you can consider –
Presentation is a very important step of the sales process where you will display the unique value of your product. The quality of the presentation will be a big determinant in influencing a buying decision, and also a key factor in nurturing leads.
This step is also important because it gives you a chance to present your product as a best-fit solution for your clients. This is why the presentation step comes after you have already understood the problems and needs of the leads.
Presentation is also the step where you get to showcase or prove your product’s USPs and capabilities. You can either give a demo or show the product sample to prospects and corroborate your claims of excellence.
Key things to consider in this stage –
It’s natural for prospects to have questions and concerns about your products. There could be plenty of reasons why a potential lead would hesitate to commit despite an interest in your offers. Pricing and timing are two key reasons why most prospects feel hesitant to go ahead with the purchase. There may be other concerns as well, but they are not as dominant as pricing and timing.
Well, whatever reasons or objections a prospect has, the sales rep has to address all of them in a detailed manner. If the rep can successfully handle all the objections, it will remove the fears from the minds of prospects, improving the chances of conversion.
Some common objections that prospects may raise –
This is the stage every sales rep hopes to reach and cross with flying colors. However, this is also the stage where a deal is made or broken, depending on how reps have handled the objections and understood the prospect’s concerns.
Closing the deal happens only after the rep has successfully convinced the prospect that their offering can meet their needs. Before moving ahead, it’s important to ask the prospect two things – If they fully understand the terms of the sales, and whether they are ready to buy.
Closing a deal often involves a lot of activities, including –
In addition, it’s equally important to ensure that the prospect is fully aware of the terms and conditions of the contract, including clauses related to subscription or membership terms, billing, refunds, etc.
Closing the deal is not the end of your sales process. Rather, you need to focus on nurturing the relationship with the client as it will help you generate new business opportunities and minimize churn.
When you invest time and energy in nurturing relationships with clients, you end up having happy customers who are considered the most valuable asset a business can have.
The same happy and nurtured customers can be a source of new customers through qualified referrals. So, you should continue to communicate and reinforce value to customers. This will offer you opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.
If you want to improve your sales process, the first question you should ask yourself – why am I doing that? You will get the answer which will be something like that – because I want to know what isn’t working and what I need to change to make it better for sales reps.
Key things you should consider –
Understanding your persona’s buyer journey can help you rectify the errors and mistakes in your sales process. You can make effective changes to your selling process only when you know how your ideal customer progresses through the different stages and ultimately buys from you.
You can make your sales framework more focused and effective when you know what drives your ideal buyer to purchase from you and why your solution may appeal to them.
Based on that analysis, you can also grasp many key information like –
Since you want to improve your sales process, before doing that, you should ask – is the existing one designed from the buyer’s perspective?
The answer should be yes only if your current process aligns with your prospect’s buying journey.
More importantly, your sales framework needs to accommodate the potential challenges and motivations of your ideal customer.
Based on this information, you can provide your sales team with the right tools and resources to establish strong bonds with prospects and present your offers to suit their needs.
Sometimes how sales reps deal with prospects at each step defines the fate of a deal. If the rep is experienced and aware of the information and content that drive leads, your chances of conversion remain high.
On the other hand, if the rep lacks knowledge of how to move prospects to close, the deal might get stuck. This is why you need to check if each of your reps uses standard information and content at each stage of the buying cycle.
Key strategies you should consider –
“If you don’t measure, you can’t improve.”
Consistently measuring the results of your existing sales process is the key to improving it. By measuring the result, you will grasp where your sales team is doing right and where it needs to improve.
In addition, only when you measure the results of your selling process will you be able to understand whether your team’s efforts match the business objective.
You can use many metrics for tracking and measuring the results of your sales performance and it’s up to you to decide which ones to use.
Sales process mapping is a visual representation that outlines the various steps, activities, and stages involved in a company’s sales process. It’s a diagram that gives a structured and step-by-step view of how a sale progresses from the initial stage to the purchase point.
Sales process mapping is done using visual tools such as flowcharts or diagrams so that sales teams can easily understand the entire process and follow the steps. In short, this mapping is a method for visually analyzing and representing the sales process with a focus on optimizing sales operations.
Step 1: Understand and Document Each Step of the Current Process –
Understanding the existing process is the first step in sales process mapping. Based on that, each step is documented with a clear mention of who is responsible for each task, the key milestones, and the tools to be used at each stage.
Step 2: Create a Visual Representation
A clear map of the sales process is created using flowcharts, diagrams, or other visual tools. This is done to help everyone easily identify inefficiencies, redundancies, and bottlenecks in the existing process.
Step 3: Analysis of Strengths and Weaknesses
Once the visual representation is done, the next step is to analyze it for strengths and weaknesses. The focus will be on identifying the areas where the sales team might face challenges, or prospects might get stuck.
Step 4: Integrate Metrics and Data
Each stage of the selling process can decide the fate of a deal. It’s therefore important to integrate metrics and data into your map and measure the performance of each stage.
Step 5: Continuous Improvement
The sales process is key to improving sales operations by identifying areas of concern. The mapping can standardize the sales framework across the organization and let you track KPIs at each stage. You can also use the mapping to train and onboard new sales members.
Step 6: Monitor and Evaluate
Now when the mapping is done, you can implement changes and then keep track of those changes. You can thus update the map accordingly as and when opportunities for improvement arise.
Past sales are always a great tool to learn a lot about prospects and what led them to convert. When you analyze your past deals, you will understand what worked for your team and what did not. You will learn about the factors that contributed the most to a deal to progress.
Analyzing past sales will help you –
A sales process works effectively when you have set goals for each step. If goals are not set, the sales team might feel confused and lack the direction to follow. Defining the metric for each stage and setting the benchmarks can help you stay on the right track all the time.
Take for example, if your business is more concerned about losing customers, you can then set a target of reducing churn rate by 20% for a specific period, or something like that. With that kind of specific goal in mind, your sales team can take each step accordingly and add value to your cause.
Sometimes, a wrong action at a crucial step might make the deal slip through the crack. This happens with the best of salespeople. To avoid that, you should create a list of specific actions for each step so that your sales team knows what to do and when.
With clear actions for each step, there won’t be any hiccups in your sales cycle and your sales reps can easily move potential leads from one step to another in a convincing manner.
A successful sale is as much about a sales team’s effort as it’s about a prospect’s intention to buy. If the prospect is not ready to buy, even the most skilled of sales reps can’t do much. It’s therefore important for you to evaluate your buyer persona so that you can better understand your customer’s actions and reactions to your sales framework.
When you evaluate your buyer persona, it means you’re ready to make your sales customer-centric. You can also identify where your team is facing difficulty in meeting customer needs and how to improve on that.
Defining your KPIs is always essential as it will help you track and measure the performance against the objectives. It will help you understand how effectively your sales team is achieving its goals. Most importantly, you can use your business-specific KPIs at different stages of the sales process to track the progress, or lack of it at any point in time.
A sales process flowchart is a document that visually depicts the key steps in the business process, from prospecting to closing deals. It’s created to serve as a guide and assist salespeople in identifying and isolating problems in the process.
Using the flowchart, sales reps can improve efficiency and reduce waste from their selling process. Most importantly, its creation paves the way for optimizing and organizing your sales activities.
Sales managers make use of the flow chart to let every member understand their roles and duties for each stage. This flowchart can help you boost your sales operations.
Benefits of using a sales process flowchart –
|
Sales Process |
Sales Methodology |
|
Series of repeatable steps to guide the prospect to the customer |
Strategy to execute each step of the sales process |
|
Outlines actions to complete a sale |
Outlines strategy to engage with customers |
|
Defines the “what” of selling |
Defines the “how” of selling |
|
Provides a standardized approach across an organization |
Provides a situation-based flexibility to salespeople |
|
Rigid with defined steps |
Adaptable based on real-time feedback |
It’s a popular sales methodology with a main tenet that says that the seller should always work to raise and overcome the objections of buyers throughout the sales process. The main idea of the Sandler Selling System is to understand the possible objections of prospects as early as possible and filter out poor-fit leads.
It’s another popular sales methodology with a main tenet that advises picking the right prospects at the very beginning and knowing very early whom to engage with. The main idea of this methodology is to continue prioritizing at each stage and understand whether an opportunity is worth pursuing.
This methodology is popular for its main tenet of focusing more on value rather than product or service. It dwells on selling value rather than what you offer as people don’t buy products; they rather buy the results of what you offer.
This methodology is based on the premise that buyers don’t buy a product or service; they rather buy the concept of the solution provided by the offer. It encourages sellers to attentively listen and then ask the right questions to buyers to better understand the concept they are looking for.
This sales methodology is an updated version of other methods like BANT and ANUM. Like them, it’s also best suited for the qualification stage. As the name suggests, the four core areas of focus of this methodology include –
Need – Identify the needs of your target audience
Economic Impact – Tell prospects the economic impact of your solution compared to their existing one
Access to Authority – Identify and engage with the people who make decisions
Timeline – Set a timeline that is suitable for both the involved parties
Sales is not as easy as it may sound on the surface. It has a detailed process for converting prospects. This process however is dynamic and may change or evolve. It’s also prone to mistakes, including –
REVE Chat is a popular SaaS company whose omnichannel customer engagement platform helps businesses delight customers and boost sales with Live Chat & AI Chatbot. Let’s understand the sales process used by this company.
Creating and mapping a sales process is vital for helping the sales team close more deals. It also helps them enhance every prospect’s experience with the brand.
At REVE, we understand the value of engagement in creating an effective sales process for your business. That’s why we offer a variety of tools to effectively engage and interact with your audience.
With us, you can sign up and check how our tools can add value to your sales process.
The sales process is a structured framework or guideline that sales reps follow to move a prospect from an early-stage lead to a paying customer.
The seven steps in a sales process include –
The sales process conveys the actions or steps salespeople take to convert prospects into customers whereas the sales funnel coveys what potential customers might do next.
The sales process outlines the actions to complete a sale whereas the sales methodology outlines strategies to engage with customers.
Some of the most extensively used sales methodologies include –
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Praveen Singh is a content marketer, blogger, and professional with 15 years of passion for ideas, stats, and insights into customers. An MBA Graduate in marketing and a researcher by disposition, he has a knack for everything related to customer engagement and customer happiness.
As a writer and analyst, he pours the heart out on a blog that is informative, detailed, and often digs deep into the heart of customer psychology. He’s written extensively on a range of topics including, marketing, AI chatbots, omnichannel messaging platforms, and many more.
Mr. Singh also has a passion for subjects that excite new-age customers, be it social media engagement, artificial intelligence, machine learning. He takes great pride in his learning-filled journey of adding value to the industry through consistent research, analysis, and sharing of customer-driven ideas.
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