How can you create a sales process that is easy to implement?

A few tips to help gain a better understanding buyer personas: 1) Research any news articles that mention your company. Any big changes/mergers happen recently? With who? 2) Who are their top people/CEO? What's the previous history of their companies? Research any big moves they are wanting to make with the company, Google is a great resource or find them on LinkedIn. 3) Check for influencers with the company. Are they promoting any big ideas? Sometimes just mentioning that you saw an influencer posting about a topic will help you gain a lot of trust.

Creating a Buyer Persona is like solving a jigsaw puzzle. You take a tiny piece at a time and then keep putting it together with other pieces until you see a beautiful visual. To do this well, follow this simple 3 step process: 1 - Use secondary research to understand everything you can about your prospect, their organization, their industry, challenges and opportunities. 2 - Speak to real prospects to understand who they are as people, what's their life been like, their journeys and what matters to them. 3 - Build a persona using these and test if you're able to predict what your prospects really care about. A good persona will give you predictability in guessing the needs. It also helps with targeting similar people.

I have worked with a few organizations that had amazing sales, but no clear definition of their buy persona/s. If you are currently in business, take your 20 top customers, and simply look to find commonalities among them. If you can find five or six points, that they all share, you know, have a roadmap to help you look for others who could fit that mold .

Absolutely, defining buyer personas is the foundation of a successful sales process. It's like having a roadmap that guides your entire sales strategy. It’s important to deeply understand your current customers and find commonalities between them. This way you can search for new customers based on very specific criteria. Also, you can take the criteria such as industry, revenue, company size etc. plug that into LinkedIn Sales Nav and search for leads.

Buyer personas are critical to winning in sales, but many salespeople ignore a vital component of buyer personas that can unlock results quickly. Include the 'job to be done' in your buyer persona criteria. What exactly does the prospect need to be done? If you have clarity on this, you will attract better-qualified prospects.

One thing I've found helpful is to also know who the main decision makers are throughout the entire sales process. No matter who you speak to first, make sure to ask a question like "I know this is a big decision, is there anyone else we need to involve in this process to make sure things run smoothly?" Preventative maintenance is the best kind of maintenance. Fix your roof before it rains.

I agree with Mary Beth. Here is a way to really dig deep and uncover exactly what is going on - say to your prospect: "Would you describe to me your decision-making process?" This does several things: 1. It avoids the 'are you the decision-maker' question, which sometimes leads us down a path of either getting it wrong or even upsetting people 2. It allows depth of explanation so you understand all the other important people, including influencers 3. It can lead nicely into a request to have a follow up meeting i.e. 'you said [name] and [name] need to be involved. Would you be able to help arrange that?' Asking in the right way can make a huge difference to how you progress.

This is the #1 thing that most sales leaders forget to do! It doesn't matter how YOU want to sell your solution. Only the process your ideal customers buy it. Those two things need to be aligned. At my 3rd start-up (that ended up being acquired by Salesforce) we explicitly made this connection early on and aligned these two threads stage by stage. In fact, illustrating how we did that and the learnings that went into it was a key reason Salesforce was so impressed by how we ran our operation.

Once you have a clear Buyer Persona, you know the people you're meant to target and have some clues about them. However, you still don't know how to take a prospect from 'not knowing about your solution' to a 'becoming a happy customer that recommends your solution to others'. To find this out, you need to try various approaches to make them aware, get a lead, turn it into a demo, providing a taste of the solution, helping them solve challenges, etc. As you do this, you'll various stages where your prospects either drop-off (go silent) or move ahead (get a bit more convinced). Those are the stages. Mark them and figure out how you can help your prospects at each stage. What they need and what helps them move ahead the best.

When doing this, don’t ignore the steps that happen after you sell something. We work so hard to get someone to purchase our product, and then we seem to just take them for granted. There is an investment that you need to make it every step of the way to ensure retention.

For me, the best deal stages are the ones that your sales team actually use to update their pipeline, and in my experience, less is more. Here are my general deal stages I like to use. Note that some specific organizations do require some additional nuance of course. 1. DISCOVERY - Qualified Lead (SQL) 2. SOLUTIONING - You have all the scoping information you need are are working on the proposed solution. 3. PROPOSAL SENT - Quote/SOW Sent 4. PROPOSAL REVISION - Procurement/legal review/negotiation 5. FINAL REVIEW - Contract should be in its final state, but you don't have a verbal just yet. 6. VERBAL - Prospect has confirmed they are signing by a certain date.

With every sales stage, be sure you have a proper way to track follow-ups. This could be as simple as an Excel sheet, or an actual CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot. It's great to have goals, but if you don't have a follow-up process in place, the odds of those goals being hit are pretty slim.

You'll never improve unless you measure. So what do you measure? The Buyer Journey above defines the steps that help your prospect move closer to buying. Based on that, you will have to try out various approaches to help your prospects. When you do this, you will start noticing a pattern amongst the prospects. You'll know what are the most important steps for them, which defines the stages in your sales process. This is where you begin measuring the effectiveness of your methods at every stage. You measure, try new approach, optimise and keep trying until you have clear stages and actions required for each stage.

Like in a funnel, stages will help you achieve 3 things among others. 1. Collect useful data about deals. 2. Identify the stages that need the most improvement to achieve the business goals. 3. Implement changes that will actually deliver results not only make others feel good.

I like to explain to our team all the steps, CRM properties, information needed, and action taken between deal stages. This makes it extremely clear when a deal/opportunity should be advanced to the next stage and give your team a better likelihood to use stages appropriately. Then, as a sales manager you're able to forecast more accurately based on deal stages of the entire pipeline.

The biggest thing to establish as a company is a consistent follow-up strategy for each stage, with frameworks in place. If everyone is on the same page about follow-up timeframes, types of reachouts/email templates, and posturing during the process, this will help eliminate confusion and frustration in the process.

Sales activities depend on the help your prospects need. As they go through each step of your buyer journey, they will feel stuck and could drop off the journey. You will have to figure out what you can provide them to help them stay on the journey and move to the next step. This process is filled with mistakes in the early days. And it is good to make wrong choices. They provide clarity on what not to do. They also force you to try something else. Only through trial and error, will you be able to build a unique set of sales activities that help you deliver on your prospects needs.

Come up with a process and write it down. Share it with all stakeholders, so you are all aligned. Review your sales activities weekly to see if you are moving the needle or to see if something in the process is broken. Too many people overthink when it comes to setting something up . Keep it simple.

Your sales process will evolve over time, or at least it should. That is a GOOD thing. Continue tinkering and being curious, but commit to the time to bring the team up to speed on the changes that are made over time. This increases adoption of process change. Think of the ADDIE model as a circular process rather than a linear one.

As a former Trainer, here are a few key elements I've found to help a sales team: 1) Live call listening - great for real-time feedback and perspective 2) Relationship building - finding out each of your sales team members' "why" is a great way to build the trust, making them more open to feedback or correction 3) Refresher trainings - make sure to continually offer refreshers on proper sales techniques, tonality, pipeline management, etc. Everyone needs to be reminded of how they can be successful!

In addition to the steps mentioned, it's vital to hire a skilled sales leader who can play a pivotal role in shaping your sales team's success. A capable sales leader not only sets the tone for accountability but also provides unwavering support and continuous training. Having a proficient sales leader at the helm ensures that accountability is ingrained in your team's culture. They guide and mentor team members, fostering an environment of growth and learning. By hiring a sales leader who can hold the team accountable, offer support when needed, and provide ongoing training, you strengthen your sales process. This leader becomes the driving force behind enhanced skills, reduced turnover, and a collective commitment to improvement.

Training your sales team on your sales process is critical for several reasons: Consistency: A standardized sales process ensures that every team member follows the same approach. Efficiency: With a defined process, your team can work more efficiently. They can identify the most promising leads, shorten sales cycles, and allocate resources effectively. Productivity: Proper training helps salespeople prioritize leads effectively. They spend less time on unqualified prospects and focus their efforts on those more likely to convert. Onboarding and Scalability: When new salespeople join, a well-defined process streamlines their onboarding, making them productive faster. Plus, scalability becomes easier with standardized procedures.

Make your sales process "AE-Proof". Choose wisely how much of your process you put on the AE. Their skill lie in their soft skills, production knowledge, and ability to bring deals to the finish line. The more clicks in your process, the more friction for your AEs. The typical AE is hyper-focused on hitting their goals and closing their deals—and that's exactly what you want them focused on!

Looking back to.my timewith Alfa Laval and ITT selling complex engineered solutions and major capital equipment. The key was to have influence on the complete DMU ..(the decision making unit) Who were both commercial and technicsl as well as financial Leaders as the decision was strategic to their business. So understanding the level of influence and their individual needs and wants was critical.

Trust your team! If you've onboarded and trained your sales team properly, there's no need to micromanage and look over their shoulders. Let them lead the prospect on the sales journey. You don't need to jump in and muddle their messaging. That will only confuse your prospect and diminish any trust your salesperson has managed to foster. There's time to review once the sales process has reached its conclusion, whether successful or a failure. Trust in your team's ability to add value and solve problems the prospect brings to the table. If the journey doesn't result in a sale, you'll need to carefully consider what went wrong. Was it your team member or was it your sales plan?