Business executives and their sales reps often struggle to streamline their sales planning process. Concentrating on sales is essential to running a successful organization, but figuring out how to perfect your process can be a challenge, given the wealth of options and conflicting advice.
This article will cover why it’s important to have sales strategy development processes in place and how you can strengthen your sales methods.
Why Are Sales Development Processes Important?
There’s nothing worse than arriving at a client meeting unprepared to answer their questions and concerns, which is why you’ve developed your current systems and processes. However, your sales department is one area of your business that constantly evolves—and your sales process needs to evolve with it.
Many sales managers and business owners struggle to implement a scalable, successful sales team. That’s because the key to doing so lies in your process.
A sales process is a map that guides your sales team to turn leads into customers. Without that map, you can’t blame them for being lost in the dark. Developing an actionable, strategic sales process can light the way.
How to Perfect Your Sales Process
You likely already have some processes for your sales team, but have you perfected them? Standardized, perfected processes that communicate clear expectations to your team will help your business make more money. Plain and simple.
Let’s get started.
7 Steps to Every Good Sales Process
The first step is to audit your current systems. We can break down the sales process into seven steps to make it easier to analyze.
- Prospect for leads
- Connect and qualify them
- Research the company
- Give them your pitch
- Address any concerns or objections
- Close the deal
- Nurture the client and continue to sell to them
Each of these steps has several internal components, but you can start by considering where you have gaps in your current processes. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- What does your prospecting system look like?
- How are you qualifying leads?
- What is your current pitch?
- Does it adequately cover the benefits your business offers?
- Does it address your target market’s pain points?
- Is it simple to understand?
- Do you have a clear CTA?
- What are the most frequently asked questions and concerns potential clients bring up?
- How are you nurturing these leads and upselling to existing clients?
Once you’ve identified areas where you could use improvement, you’re ready for an action plan.
How to Improve Your Sales Process
Here are three ways you can work toward improving your sales process:
1. Map Your Customer’s Journey
One of the best ways to create an effective action plan for your sales process is to outline the customer’s journey. They say to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes to understand them, so take the time to do that for your customers.
Use your target personas to ascertain the sales cycle from your customer’s perspective. From there, you can improve the touch points.
2. Define Your Customer’s Actions
The most important part of a sales cycle is that your customers are moving through it. It can be extremely valuable to determine where in the cycle your customers are making decisions that move them from one phase to the next.
3. Measure Your Results
Now we’re getting into the nitty-gritty details. If you want to determine whether your current process is effective, the best thing to do is measure your results.
Some basic metrics you can measure will tell you about your conversion rates and other feedback. This is crucial in reconstructing and strengthening your current sales process.
Learn More About Pinpoint Management’s Custom Sales Plans
You could go through every stage of your sales process and scrutinize where to improve, which metrics to track, and how to rewrite and perfect pitches, but this requires a lot of time, money, and objective expertise. Or, you could reach out to Pinpoint Management.
Our team of experienced business experts can help you create a tailored performance plan for your organization. We specialize in creating documented sales processes, sales client profiles, sales training, call tracking, analytics, and more. Let us get our hands dirty while you focus on innovation and your industry expertise.
Contact us today to get started.