Define each stage of the sales process, provide the right tools for success, and coach your team to ensure full buy-in.
Few things can be more critical to your company’s growth than your sales process. But when you step back to evaluate your team’s methods, you may wonder whether your process is more of a hindrance than a help.
After all, as important as traits like persistence and having good people skills can be in sales, they aren’t going to be enough to create a winning process on their own. The good news is that improving your processes (and sales results) doesn’t take several months.
You can make quick and effective upgrades by taking a few key actions.
Clearly define each stage of the sales process.
A successful sales process should be customer-focused, adapting to how your customers prefer to buy from you and implementing steps that match their buying process. Transitioning to the mindset of understanding that you are helping customers solve a problem or achieve a goal can better align your team’s actions with your customers’ needs.
With that in mind, your team should carefully map out the various stages or touchpoints where they contact prospects during the sales process. This could include initial connections, the exploration phase, presenting solutions, closing, etc.
More importantly, you should define each stage and identify best practices for each step. This could include having videos that you can make available to prospects during the exploration phase or a list of talking points for common pain points when presenting solutions.
What matters most is that you can map out and “plan” the sales process to eliminate the guesswork for your team. A well-defined plan means they’ll know what to do and how to respond to prospects at any stage of their journey.
Give your team the right tools for success.
The right tech tools can go a long way in empowering your team and improving your sales processes. CRM tools are crucial for logging customer interactions and aligning customer-facing team members to keep everyone on the same page and ensure no prospect slips through the cracks.
Sales-focused tools can do much more than provide a convenient location for recording and sharing data. Many can help automate sales emails, provide guided selling support, and even use prospect responses to help generate accurate quotes and proposals.
In a case study published by DealHub, Lumina Solar reduced its proposal creation time by 80 percent by utilizing a proposal generation tool instead of manually entering data in spreadsheets, DocuSign, Word templates, and other siloed applications. Finished proposals were error-free and looked more professional, making a stronger impression on leads while reducing the back office burden.
Adopting CRMs and other purpose-built sales tools may require some adjustment for your team. But access to quality data, automation, and streamlining of day-to-day tasks will make them far more efficient — and much better equipped to close the sale.
Coach your team.
Whenever you’re implementing changes to your sales process, you must ensure full buy-in from your team. This is especially true when adopting new software tools. Helping team members understand why you are implementing changes and how to make the most of these changes will ensure that process updates deliver the payoff you expect.
Learning workshops, one-on-one training and other meetings may prove necessary to help individual team members adapt to changes and fully commit to using new tools or following new guidelines. Of course, leaders should also hold team members accountable for using new tools or processes.
The stats behind business coaching help put in perspective how much of a difference a leader’s guidance can make: 80 percent of employees report greater self-confidence after receiving coaching, while over 70% improve their performance at work. Such outcomes can dramatically boost sales results for your company, allowing you to do more than make up for your initial investment.
Turn your sales process into a strength.
You can unleash a dramatic transformation with a clearly defined sales process, backed by the tools and resources your team members need to work more effectively. Whether your team comprises sales veterans or relative newbies, these key actions will provide a much-needed upgrade to help them unlock their full potential.
This article was written by Heather Wilde from Inc. and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplace by Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to [email protected].
