Create a Sales Process to Develop Your Sales Team and Scale Your Company

Great salespeople and amazing sales results aren’t born strictly from natural talent. Just like an athlete, dedication, drive, and the desire to further develop are critical to a salesperson’s success.

Once you’ve hired the right people, how are you coaching them and ensuring their success? It’s critical to give them a playbook or sales process to follow.

Consider the sales cycle at your company.

Every customer is unique. However, the process that they follow to take them to the point of purchase is often common and predictable. Understanding the steps of your customer’s journey is vital. Your sales process should complement each of these stages to truly succeed — whether in the qualification, discovery, demo, or post-sales support phases of engagement.

A sales process provides a framework that guides your sales reps to close deals. It takes goals and turns them into actionable steps that they can complete during each stage of the sales cycle. From a leadership perspective, it ensures forecasting accuracy, allows you to pinpoint areas to coach, and determine the best growth strategy for your company overall.

What other variables should you consider while guiding your sales team?

1)??? There is a significant difference between selling products or services, which is often transactional, to providing solutions that are tailored to a customer’s needs. Part of the process should be proper discovery to uncover the customer’s needs and positioning that aligns the solution with your company’s offerings.

?2)??? Selling to a prospective customer with no prior experience with your company versus an established customer who already trusts your business and whose requirements you already know, require different approaches and likely sales reps with different strengths and training. Are they hunters, who are focused on customer acquisition, or farmers, who cultivate relationships?

?3)??? Evaluate your customer management strategy from a holistic perspective, rather than using a siloed approach. The relationship between marketing, sales, and customer service will shift at different points in the buying process. Clear handoffs and alignment between the three are critical to sales success and customer satisfaction. Who focuses on brand awareness, lead generation, qualifying prospects, closing, and customer success?

Developing a sales process takes work. “Let’s let the salespeople figure it out as they go” may be the easiest approach; however, creating a sales process will ensure the team’s success. Your challenge, as leaders, is to analyze what has already been achieved in your sales function, determine its relative success, and understand where your business has the potential to achieve higher goals.??

Selling is all about performance. World-class performance doesn’t happen by chance. You’ll need to adapt to markets, economies, and your growth trajectory, while keeping customers at your core. By developing a sales process that matches your buyers, markets, and product/solution capabilities — and adhering to its principles —you’ll give your business the best possible chance of sales success.?