8 Best Practices for Creating Your Sales Process
Simply put, a sales process is a set of repeatable steps to convert a prospect into a client. Proven & repeatable sales processes increase sales, boost client satisfaction, improve succession value and ownership payout, and build firm prestige. Despite sales processes being extremely valuable, a lot of sales professionals choose to not use one. However, sales professionals that use a sales process outperform those who don’t.
Here are our eight best practices for creating a sales process:
Review your current sales process. The first step is to review your current sales process to determine its benefits and shortcomings. Even if you do not have a proven & repeatable sales process yet, you need to review how your sales professionals convert prospects into clients. We recommend talking to each of your sales professionals to see what they do, what is working, and what is not working. At Sebastian Lane Consulting, this is the first step to onboarding our clients. We even offer our Sales Best Practices Assessment as a service for organizations that want an expert to review their current sales process.
Determine your goals and objectives. Goals and objectives are important because they provide something for your team to focus on and work towards. Also, they help you measure whether your new sales process is working. We recommend taking some time to reflect on what is most important to your business, along with your short-term and long-term goals. Then, craft some goals and measurable objectives.
Write out your ideal client’s customer journey. The key to a great sales process is to always keep the client in mind. This step should get into the nitty-gritty of your ideal client’s customer journey. How does a prospect go from a lead to a satisfied customer? How do they first find out about your business? These are all questions you need the answers to before you start creating your sales process.
Consider your clients’ pain points. After you determine the client’s customer journey, you need to explore your clients’ pain points. What is keeping them up at night? What is the most stressful part of their job? What kind of services do you offer that can help them relieve these pain points? Why may they be hesitant to buy your services? You have to put yourself in your clients’ shoes and answer the difficult questions.
Tailor your sales process to your culture and methodologies. Not all sales processes look the same. They may follow similar roadmaps, but the intricacies and details should align with the culture of your organization and its methodologies. Every organization operates differently and will apply different sales tactics. Your sales process should fit your organization and its needs.
Ensure your sales professionals buy-in. Once you have created a sales process you are proud of, make sure your sales professionals adopt it. One of the best ways to do this is to encourage their feedback—positive and negative. If you maintain good communication with your sales professionals, they will feel valued and buy-in to the sales process a lot quicker.
Make sure your sales process is repeatable. Your sales process should be proven & repeatable so every sales professional in your organization can use it effectively. To do this, you will need to tailor your sales process to your organization and its clients, but not make it so specific that it only works for a certain situation or prospect.
Analyze the results. As with most best practices, you need to analyze the results over time to determine if your new sales process is working. Now is the time to see if your new sales process achieved the goals and objectives that you outlined earlier. It is also important to get feedback from your sales professionals and your clients to see what can be improved. If anything needs to be reworked, adjust it to better fit your needs.
WANT TO GET STARTED, BUT ARE NOT SURE WHERE TO BEGIN? TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OUR SALES ASSESSMENT OPPORTUNITY.
Sebastian Lane Consulting will benchmark your sales process, people and practices against top-performing organizations. We review the corporate sales and business development plan to establish strengths and a unified vision to help companies establish culture, easing reinforcement by management. This helps firms properly resource their sales and marketing efforts to match their goals.
To schedule your free initial consultation, call Sebastian Lane Consulting at 443-534-6783 or email us at jesse@sebastianlaneconsulting.com. Our top priority is to provide value for your business, which is why we provide 30-day partnerships instead of binding contracts.