Sales process design and implementation
Every organization has a Sales Process, documented or not, consistent or not. A sales process should be clearly defined, measureable, repeatable and executable, comprising a series of steps beginning with lead generation, and going all the way through to landing the sale. Your Sales Process should encapsulate practices that yield results.
Here is a typical sales process:
- Incoming Lead
- Qualification
- Follow-up
- Sales Conversations
- Presentation
- Proposal
- Negotiation
- Close
When your sales team is not generating results as expected, we need to quickly diagnose what's not working, and often simply identifying these performance "gaps", can lead to actions that can quickly drive demonstrable improvements. For example, a 5% improvement in the efficiency in "Lead Generation" might in fact yield an overall improvement in multiple elements across the Sales Process, and conceivably generate overall performance improvements of 15% or more.
Every business is defined by the unique processes that it executes. Some organizations have outstanding delivery processes; others have top notch customer service. Moreover, others have phenomenal product management processes. Sales shouldn’t be different. It’s still a process. All the great sales organizations have a productive sales process. We only need to think of such companies as Xerox and IBM, known for the way they manage sales and as such have earned the title of outstanding sales schools.
A popular myth is that the success of sales largely depends on having top notch sales representatives. Having worked with superstars in the past I can say with a great deal of certainty that the biggest differentiating factor that makes these individuals overachievers is that they have a great sales process. However, be careful; when they leave so too does the sales process.
Taking control means understanding the entire sales process; how it works, what results you should expect at each step, making adjustments or improvements consistently and most of all executing. The concept is no different than running any other business process. Selling is much more of a science than an art. How else can we explain how some companies consistently succeed in top line revenue goals? You guessed it, they have a great sales process.
Elevate Coaching believes that a sales process is like a sophisticated machine with lots of moving parts. Changes in personnel, market dynamics or even regulations will affect the performance of the sales process. To this end, every leader must have at his/her disposal a tool kit designed to maintain, improve or fix a sales process. Elevate Coaching designed a framework composed of six dimensions many of which are interdependent, meaning that when you implement elements of one or more of the dimensions, there is a positive impact on one or several other dimensions. The aggregate effect is that the entire sales process improves. Below is the description of Elevate Coaching’s Sales Performance framework and a brief description of each dimension.
As leaders constantly support these dimensions without ignoring any of them, the sales process has a much better chance of delivering results that are proportionate to work put into these dimensions. After all, great input into a system results in a great output.
Elevate’s Sales process Performance Framework will prove instrumental in supercharging your sales revenues and setting your business on the road to continuous improvement. You'll book more business, reduce your expenses (and stress level), attract better employees, and grow faster...a lot faster, because that's the least that you deserve!