Do You Carry Too Much Baggage In Your Sales Process?

As Sales Ops pros and Sales Leaders, one of the things we struggle most with as we're scaling up our sales team is how messy our process gets along the way.

One of the reasons why the process gets so messy is we don't document everything involved from lead to close - from the people who need to be involved, the tools, to all the different admin steps we're taking at every single stage of the process to get a deal done.

Without the full visualization of all the admin tasks from start to finish, it makes it hard for us to understand how to optimize and scale our process.

SaaS Scale-up Struggling with Proposals

I'll give you an example. I was talking to a Sales Director at a 120 person SaaS company (40 people in the sales team) not long ago, and they were struggling with putting proposals together, getting them to their customers fast enough.

They're in a competitive market, and the customer experience really matters. In order for them to put their best foot forward, they spend a long time on the look and feel of their proposals.

As a result, their competitors were coming in and stealing deals because they couldn't get a compelling proposal out the door.

And he was telling me about how he's copy-pasting stuff from multiple word documents into one doc and then go into Google drive to find the latest case study. Then he's trying to put all of it into Canva to mock up a design, just to end up sending it to the designer, wasting multiple people's time.

It took two or three days to get something out. This is WAY too long.

He asked me how he could make the process of putting a Word/PDF proposal together more efficient?

The reality is, do you REALLY need a Word document? Do you need a PDF? Is that a requirement in your industry, where your clients absolutely NEED that kind of document in order to close a deal?

Probably not. So why are you doing this?

The guy couldn't answer.

It was just the way it had been done. It was what the sales reps, leaders, and marketing designers were familiar with. They didn't know of any other way.

He was thinking about it from the wrong angle. He was trying to automate some of what he had. But what he was using as a proposal wouldn't even deliver the best customer experience in the first place.

And he's not the only one who's struggling with process design/improvements:

• Insidesales.com found that reps spend 63% of their time on non-selling tasks
• Salesforce Research found that 45% of reps say their process is ineffective because of excessive admin tasks
• And CSO Insights found that 50% of forecasted deals don't close in time or at all.

Are You Building a Franken-Process?

There are lots of Sales Leaders or Sales Ops professionals that, when they think about their process, they think about how to optimize what they already have. Making it 1% better every week or month. Small changes and additions over time.

Adding more tools. Hiring people to take on the work. What you thought would help and scale - which does in the short run - ends up creating a HUGE mess over time.

When you look at your current process, ask yourself it's the right change or thing to put in place now. What worked well 10 years ago doesn't work now. Trying to optimize an outdated process is the wrong approach.

Is your process limiting what you can do? Both from enabling your own sales reps, but also delivering a better customer experience?

Are you handcuffed by the way you're thinking?

And do you have the right mindset around your process?

For example, when you're building out your proposal process, if your mindset is around optimizing the creation of a Word doc or PDF to make the creation way more efficient, then your mindset is not even the right place. That's what you should have done 5-10 years ago.

There are lots of tools on the market now (go check out the top rated proposal software on G2) that can deliver a much more engaging, interactive customer experience that are better than your traditional proposal, and WAY easier for reps to put together.

So when you're building process, think about what kind of baggage you're carrying from what you already have in place, and REALLY understand if you need to optimize what you have.

And if you were to eliminate all of that, what could you do instead?

Would it be a better experience for both your reps and your customers?

I'd love to get your thoughts on this.

Are you guys tacking on stuff to your old process and putting a Franken-process together? Are you trying to optimize what's not even the best customer experience in the first place?

Leave your feedback or opinion in the comments below, like this, share this with your peers. Let's get a conversation going.