Does your company have a sales process in place? In this Expert Insight Interview, Doug Brown discusses the optimization of a sales process. Doug Brown is a sales revenue growth expert, business consultant, author, and speaker.
The interview discusses:
- How to evaluate your sales process
- Using the sales process to gain insights
- Key benefits of a sales process
- Referrals as part of the sales process
Evaluate Your Sales Process
The sales process often gets a bit neglected and overlooked in an organization. However, it needs constant checking because it reflects the dynamics of the target market and consumer behavior. Buyers’ needs and target market are very fluid. Thus, it is essential to stay clear and truthful in setting goals. Next, assess whether the organization can actually grow to the planned level. Sometimes, the challenge is in the sales process itself, lack of skills, or people themselves. Not everyone is up for the salesman job. And the last part is to focus on the massive prospecting.
Information Pool
The sales process is the source of the vast information available for performance analytics. For instance, it is easy to see which stage works the best and where the team or an individual struggle the most. That way, managers can set up training for things that need improvement or team up people making everyone works the area they perform the best.
Key Benefits
Research shows that all best performing sales companies have sales processes with clearly defined steps. A quality sales process is duplicatable, consistent, and objective, all three being very critical components for working in B2B. That way, customers have a consistent experience with the company. In addition, the sales process makes it easier to create better sales forecasts and predictable budgets.
Furthermore, managers need to show that they care about the sale process by continuously coaching it and examining its execution. If the manager shows no interest in the sales process, other employees will naturally follow the same behavior. It is a misconception that having sales process in place kills creativity. On the contrary, having a sales process in place enables one to focus on activities that bring higher value to both customers and a company.
Referrals
Referrals should also be part of the sales process. People are usually reactive when asking for referrals, but it is hard to notice it because there are no KPIs to measure the performance. Thus, being proactive and using systematic process will bring a consistent number of referrals. Doing the job right will most likely get you a referral. You only need to improve the way of getting it.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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