Design your sales process
Everybody in business is in one way or another, in sales.
After all, you do not make a living by giving stuff away, you actually have to sell it.
It is also true that not everybody will want your stuff, in fact, usually very few will want it, so the challenge is to find them, engage them, demonstrate the value, and then create a transaction.
All this takes time and effort, it will not happen by some sort of osmotic process, giving a bloke a sales folder, a car, and map no longer works, the sales process needs to be specifically designed to create the circumstances in which a transaction can take place.
35 years of designing them in one way or another has led to a few conclusions on the best way to go about it,
- Ensure you understand the buyer, and their buying processes. One size does not fit all, each will be different, and by whatever means you need to define their processes, pain points, and priorities so you can build messages that resonate.
- Design a detailed process. Given each prospect will be different, the process needs to be both robust and sufficiently agile to accommodate the nuances of each customer. Generally it will have a number of stages that fits the product you are selling. Office supplies will differ substantially from power stations, but the principal remain the same. Set the stages, and the triggers that move a prospect from one stage to the next.
- Develop a playbook for each stage. This will involve both the response to the persona of the prospect and delivering the type of content that they will respond to at their point in the sales cycle, the delivering the content in the most appropriate manner.
- Routinize the sales process. Like any process, a sales process is best if it works routinely, in a predictable and consistent way. Improvements then come from the anomalies and outlier things that pop up, and become very obvious simply because they are outside the norm. it may be a inquiry from a market you had never considered, or an idea on how to improve your product for a particular purpose, whatever, the sales process needs to make the odd thought obvious so it does not get missed in the welter of activity that occurs.
- Manage the metrics. Like any process, a sales funnel can be continuously improved, you can also ensure sales priorities are optimised, and KPI’s set and managed.
- Engage your sales force in the process design and ongoing improvements, and feedback loops. Over time as the process evolves and new sales people come along, to keep a sales process delivering it needs to be able to evolve at least as fast as the customers you are seeking to serve. Sales people come in many colours, like the rest of us, and managing any diverse group of people requires that they buy into the objectives of the strategies in front of them sufficiently strongly to resist the temptation to chase the new shiny thing.
None of this is easy, despite all the verbiage out there that seems to indicate it is. Designing an effective sales process takes time, effort, investment, and iteration. The good pat is that effective process design quickly pays for itself.
