At the heart of a successful business is a well-defined sales process. Without a clearly defined sales process, the revenues will not go up, even if you have an exceptional sales team.
The sales process includes a set of repeatable actions the sales team follows. These steps include the journey the sales reps take while converting prospecting to customers. That’s why if you are building a new sales team, your primary focus should be on creating an organized sales process they can easily follow.
There is no single sales formula that fits every team. However, there are steps you can follow to build a sales process that works for your team. In this article, you will learn the three phases that help you develop a sales process that works for your team.
1. Press start: Keep on taking action and documenting them
When you are just getting started with your sales, you can’t know what works for you. A good rule of thumb is to get started with taking actions and analyzing if they help the sales team.
As soon as you start getting data and feedback from your sales team, you can craft and modify the rules to work in your favor.
The crucial action in this phase is documenting the feedback and data from the sales reps. For this phase, having a CRM to record everything is vital. The more you structure steps, actions, and data in your CRM, the more you enable your team to track high-quality leads.
2. On the move: Define selling stages and activities
Now that you have a set of rules and data from CRM in motion, you can continue to develop selling stages and activities.
There are three simple rules to follow for defining sales process stages at this phase:
- Make each selling stage unambiguous and easy to grasp – Test if a colleague from a different department can understand the selling stages. If they cannot apprehend it without trouble, you need to go deep in clarifying them.
- Each stage has its distinguishable characteristics – It should be crystal clear to you what moves a lead from one stage to another. Your sales team must know the difference between each stage and what they should do to move the opportunity to the next stage. If colleagues from another department can’t spot the difference between the stages, you need to go back and sharpen them.
- As sales stages progress, meaningful improvement happens toward the buying decision – As you keep advancing the sales stages, they will create less friction in moving the customers through their journey.
Besides setting the stages, you should focus on creating sales activities your team needs to do. Make sure to create a concise list, including only significant activities that help the sales reps reach their goals. Avoid adding small administrative tasks such as “lunch meeting minutes” as they will add additional work for the team to do.
3. Charge up: Assist the buyer’s journey
Your CRM is up and running, and the stages and activities of your sales are defined. Now you should shift your focus from the internal selling process to the process the customers go through.
To define the customer’s buying journey, here are three practices to keep in mind:
- Stages are not the team’s steps but the buyer’s process – As you move away from the internal sales process, you understand that the stages are not how the team sells but how the customers buy. To do this, identify sales stages and replace them with actions the buyers take in that stage.
- Set customers and sales reps exit criteria at each stage – It is essential to define the criteria and actions the sales team must take before moving to the next stage. At the same time, you need to have buyer exit criteria that show the progress of the buyer’s journey. These criteria need to be objective and measurable.
- Give space to the buyers to follow their path – No single person is alike. Thus we all make decisions differently. It is relevant to acknowledge this while building your sales process as it allows the customers to follow their journey. To do so, focus less on the steps execution order. Instead, spend your energies identifying the activities essential to turn the prospects into customers.
To sum up
The success of a business is directly related to the sales process it follows. When building a new sales team, it is pivotal to move through the phases smoothly. A general rule is to start implementing small actions in your sales process, collect and organize data in a CRM, and then allow your team to grow from there.
