The Importance of a Sales Process

According to Jeffrey Gitomer, author of the best selling Little Red Book of Selling, “Sales is a Process – a completely predictable process. Follow the steps and you will close deals. Skip steps and you will lose”. To support this, Jeb Blount, author of Fanatical Prospecting wrote “Sales is a Linear and Logical Process that, when fully leveraged, guarantees a higher win-probability. It just doesn’t make sense to ignore it”.

As a sales trainer and consultant, I encounter many different types and sizes of organisations and when I ask about their Sales Process, I usually get a very washy response. Yes, people have one, sort of, but it’s not very well defined and not everyone follows it. One corporate client was slow to reveal theirs, but when they did, it wasn’t a Sales Process at all, it was a Sales Order Process, they didn’t understand what a Sales Process was!

A Sales Process is a series of high-level steps, a journey, that a salesperson and buyer together embark on, so that each party eventually arrives at a place where their business objectives are met.

Each step in the process exists for a reason, it fulfils a specific requirement, that if missed, may result in the entire process being derailed. That is why Jeffrey Gitomer stated, “Skip steps and you will lose”.

A Sales Process could include these steps:

1. Prospecting
2. Qualification
3. Engagement
4. Discovery
5. Presentation
6. Proof of Concept
7. Objection Handling
8. Negotiation
9. Closing
10. Implementation
11. Follow Up
12. Referrals

Each organisation, and indeed, each product line within an organisation, must decide what each step means to them, and if they should include it in their own unique process. They may choose not to include some steps and/or include other unlisted steps. They may choose to combine steps and/or to use different descriptors. The sequence of the steps may differ to how they are listed above, and some steps may appear more than once.

Whatever the outcome, the agreed Sales Process, should be clearly documented and everyone involved in the Sales Function should fully understand it, not just the steps and the sequence, but why the process should be followed.

Visibility Through CRM

In addition, your CRM system should reflect your process. The status of each Opportunity should be marked according to the step in the process last completed (not in progress), with an associated win-probability*, expressed as a percentage. The following graphs show the difference between a healthy Sales Pipeline and an unhealthy one.

The objective of every salesperson is to bring their buyer from whatever step of the process they are at, to the next step, until finally, they reach the final step, the conclusion of both their efforts. Along the way, some opportunities will be lost and that’s simply the nature of selling, thus the funnel effect of the healthy pipeline.

The unhealthy pipeline, suggests the following:

• That although Prospecting activity is healthy, it could be healthier
• Qualified Leads are not being acted upon, maybe two separate teams?
• More Proposals than Discoveries indicates that the Proposals are aged and not being progressed to Close
• A large number of Closed deals might suggest that the sales team are too busy working on Implementation, rather than progressing deals through the pipeline. The upshot of this pipeline is a lean next period.

Ratios

Some steps, or a combination of steps, can be measured against others. For instance, how many Qualified Leads result from a Prospecting campaign containing 50 targeted companies? Or, how many Presentations do you have to deliver to Close one deal? These measures are referred to as Ratios.

Example

• Prospecting to Qualified Lead Ratio = 3:1
• Qualified Lead to Proposal Ratio = 1.5:1
• Proposal to Close Ratio                      = 2:1

More often than not, these Ratios are unknown, simply because the data is not recorded. If mechanisms were in place, and the ratios were known, it would become crystal clear to all concerned, just how much activity needs to take place for targets to be reached.

Using the above examples, if your sales target is 4 deals in a period, you should progress 8 deals through the Proposal stage, to do that you will need 12 Qualified Leads and to secure those, you need to Prospect 36 target companies.

Lower Level Processes

Each step in the Sales Process is a process in its own right. Prospecting, for instance, comprises three stages of planning before anything is executed. Discovery requires lists of questions with consideration of communications styles. Presentation methods must achieve the view of differentiated value and risk mitigation, etc. etc., but that’s another day’s work.

The Sales Process is your starting point, it is vital to your selling success, as individuals and companies, that you implement a strong structural foundation to build your Sales Function on.

Brendan Dunne is the Founder of Proactive Pipeline, a B2B sales training and consultancy practice, who bring small companies to the next level through sales led initiatives.

*For those who would like to take a more scientific approach to Win-Probability measures, please contact Brendan Dunne to ask about SOPAC.