The sales process...?

What is my sales process?

Having worked in a consultative sales environment for a number of years I wanted to share what I perceive as my sales process. This includes how I set up my business, identify prospects/partners and how I like to do business. Appreciate this is being posted on a ‘social’ platform so would welcome any feedback from both peers and customers.

• Identify possible revenue streams – My first action when approaching a quota based role is look to understand how my peers have previously got to goal. This could be broken down to a number of different factors; incoming business, cold calling, partners, existing run rate to name a few. The goal here is to break my target up so I understand what my probable revenue streams are. From there I can then look to set up campaigns in each of these streams and begin to build my plan for ‘goal’.
• Understand current use cases – I am a big promotor of replica type selling – For me this is the best way to validate my solution and value proposition. I always look at why a customer bought? What problem did we help fix? What opportunity did we help create? From there I will profile similar type customers and look to speak to them. I appreciate each customer is different but this helps set parity and demonstrate the value we can add.
• What’s happening in my customers industry? In my early days I was of the mentality just hammer the phone and eventually someone will want to speak to you. Years later I have learnt that this is NOT necessarily the best approach. ‘Customer intimacy’ is a big part of the sales process in my opinion – it is initially what helps get your foot through the door. For me potential customers will always value a rep that is credible and has taken the time to make their USP as relevant as possible. By showing that you can understand how your solution is relevant to the customer and help fix or generate opportunity you will start having better business led conversations. The first step is to understand the key themes in their industry – Gartner/Ovum/Artesian/Google/company website are generally my go-to sources. I then look to interpret this information and apply where relevant.
• Wall of standards – I personally set myself benchmarks or levers for what I consider success looks like. I appreciate you can’t go in everyday expecting to close business. BUT what you can do is try to give yourself the best chance to be successful. For example; daily KPI’s I may set myself are spending 2 hours on client facing activity a day, setting up 1 meeting, sending out 1 proposal – This may not directly result in a deal but its creating the environment to give me the best chance of being successful. I can then work with my boss to understand close rates and volume of deals needed. I.e. hypothecical target is ￡5K – AOV is ￡1K but close rate is 30% means at any time I need a minimum of 17 deals to give myself a good chance of getting to goal. By knowing 'my numbers' I can then work with my boss to improve things like 'average order value' and close rates. By sticking to these ‘wall of standards’ I am creating an environment where I am ‘making my own luck’.
• Know where I am with my deals – A deal or sales cycle can have many stages – I try to keep this process as simple as possible so I always know where I am with a deal. I have broken this down in four stages; 1) Discovery 2) Validation 3) Proposal 4) Close. You are probably thinking it is never that simple and you are probably right. However, if you think of all the elements in bringing in a deal in you could probably group them in one of these four categories. From there you can dig deeper. One of my former employers would use a Spider mind map which was pretty cool to understand where you are! Tools like this really help!
• Don’t BS - Your customers are not stupid – any credible buying manager will be able to spot someone fibbing a mile away. The biggest lesson I have learnt is if you don’t know the answer – just be frank and say ‘I don’t know the answer BUT I will go away and find out for you’. This is the best way to earn your buyers trust and ensure you have a good relationship moving forward.
• Know what your talking about – What I mean by this is understand the product you are trying to sell. This doesn’t mean the speeds and feeds but more so the top level problems it may help fix and where it sits in the wider marketplace. I always ask my new customers why they bought from me. The most common answer I get is “Vaseem – you got it! You understood what I was looking to achieve and presented a solution that was able to help”. I find being honest about what it can’t help with also is very important. An example would be quantifying a problem. A customer may have a problem that is business critical to them – If I can help with 80% of that problem what would that mean? We can then mutually figure out how we fix the remaining 20%.
• Always listen to your customer – This may seem obvious but it the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule is the oldest rule in the book – Being a sales person I am very passionate and want the customer to get enthused about what I’m talking about. In my ‘youth’ this meant I missed out listening to golden nuggets my client may have mentioned in the call. Ultimately this may result me on missing out on deals or failing to build relevant value. I have learnt that it’s best to take a step back and let the customer talk – the more you listen the more you will understand. This is obviously coupled with relevant engaging open questions.
• Do the right thing – I am a big believer in business ethics, what I mean by that is if you do the right thing the rule of thumb is you will get the right result. By putting the customer central to everything that I do I can understand my customer better and thus offer the best solution. The conversation then becomes less about price but more about value. This links in from a number of the points above but I thought its worth a mention as its an important value to me!

This is my first blog post on LinkedIn and in time hope to make this a regular occurrence. Please do leave any constructive feedback, thoughts or experiences. Keen to hear from both clients and peers. My process is far from perfect and nowhere near finished but hopefully gives you a flavor of things that work well based on my experiences. Thanks for reading!