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Sales Process
How to Create an Effective Sales Process
Developing and implementing a sales process is the only way to predictably scale a sales program.
It provides structure, organization, and consistency in the sales approach, and it allows for continuous optimization and improvement.
Without a process, sales teams are flying blind, trying some things that work and some things that don’t, never able to replicate success or build upon it.
Sales processes can range from the simple to incredibly complex, but the one thing all effective sales teams have in common is they have a defined process by which they operate.
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What is a Sales Process?
A sales process is a set of steps or stages that sales teams follow when selling a product or service.
Sales processes can vary greatly in complexity and length – especially for B2B sales teams, which can entail multiple buyers and commitments.
Sales processes can range from simple processes to more complex models that include dozens of steps and branching logic.
Sales processes usually follow these stages: prospecting, qualifying, presenting, negotiating/closing, and following up.
A sales process shouldn't be confused with a sales methodology.
Sales methodologies, such as SPIN selling and challenger selling, are frameworks or approaches that guide all sales efforts. They fit within a sales process.
Why is a Sales Process Important?
The sales process is important for sales teams because it helps create consistency and structure. For sales reps, it gives them a model to follow, which removes inconsistency as well as bad practices, resulting in more closed deals. For sales leaders, it gives them the ability to more accurately measure performance and identify areas of improvement.
Here are five benefits of setting up a sales process.
1. Increased efficiency
A one-person sales team can improvise, but as the team grows, a process is required. This allows for scale while maintaining consistency across all touchpoints.
This efficiency also allows sales leaders to model out and predict how many leads will be needed, how many meetings the team needs to book, and what the team’s projected revenue will likely be.
At each step of the process, there's likely to be wasted effort, extraneous tasks, missing data, and inefficient communication. Outlining and following a sales process helps identify and fix these things.
2. Improved customer service
By creating a sales process with customer service in mind, sales reps can provide better and more consistent experiences for customers.
Far too many times, deals fall through due to simple mistakes like missing follow-ups, lack of collaboration between sales and other teams like customer onboarding and marketing, and misidentifying bad-fit leads.
3. Easily onboard new sales reps
Having a sales process in place allows you to hire and train sales reps more easily and get value from them faster.
Sales leaders can use the process as a roadmap, providing clear guidance on what reps should be doing at each stage and how best to approach customers.
4. Higher sales performance
Sales processes make it easier to track individual sales rep performance.
Sales leaders can measure metrics such as lead response time, number of sales qualified leads (SQLs), sales conversion rates, and average sales cycle to get a better understanding of what's working and what's not.
Having a sales process for the whole team means sales leaders can establish baseline metrics and determine when sales reps are underperforming and make adjustments.
5. Quantify and optimize your sales system
Sales leaders are often given this advice when starting a program: hire two sales reps and create one sales process.
This allows executives to have an independent variable (the process) and test the sales reps' performance against it.
Having a consistent approach allows sales leaders to set baselines and identify areas to improve in the system. If everything is done in an ad hoc fashion, it's hard to isolate variables that need to improve.
Challenges in Implementing a Sales Process
Some organizations struggle to implement sales processes, despite the benefits of doing so. In many cases, it’s not an issue of lacking the will; it’s the difficulty in truly orchestrating systems within an organization. The four most common challenges sales leaders may face when setting up a sales process include not enough resources, lack of alignment, poor execution and adapting to changing customer needs and environments.
Resources are almost always a constraint. When building out a sales process, sales leaders need to keep resource constraints in mind and build a process that reflects the reality of the business today as well as where it could go in the future. Not only do sales leaders need to enable their team to execute on the sales process, but they need to get executive buy-in as well as buy-in from stakeholders in marketing, support, finance, and other departments. Creating a sales process is only the first step in implementing a sales program. Sales reps need to follow through with the sales process steps so it can be effective. This requires sales managers to monitor sales rep performance and provide feedback when needed. Things change -- consumer behavior, the economy, macro-trends, and more. Sales processes should be living, breathing documents that change when needed.
Differences Between B2B vs B2C Sales Process
The sales process for business-to-business (B2B) sales is often much longer than the process used for business-to-consumer (B2C) sales because there are usually many decision-makers involved in a B2B sales cycle. Additionally, B2B sales cycles often involve more complex sales presentations, longer sales cycles, and higher price points.
Within B2B, different business models may predicate on different sales processes. For example, product-led growth companies may deal with a large volume of product users that become leads (product-qualified leads) and engage in a bottom-up sales process.
Enterprise B2B companies may deal with dozens of stakeholders with varying levels of decision-making ability, which may involve multi-threading and several targeted account-based marketing campaigns.
What Are the Stages of a Sales Process?
Every sales process is unique to the company that's running it. The point is to identify what works in a specific context, document it, and scale it beyond a single sale.
However, broadly speaking, sales processes tend to have similar stages. These include:
How to Establish a Sales Process in 5 Steps
Figuring out what to include in a sales process is like determining which ingredients are needed for a recipe. Of course, this is an important prep stage, but the real work comes in prioritizing the order and steps of the recipe.
Likewise, once sales leaders have established which pieces of the sales process to include, they can prep and construct the process in these five steps:
1. Understand Your Target Market and Value Proposition
Before scripting sales playbooks, sales leaders should have a solid understanding of their target market, including their ideal customer profile. They should also understand and define the company and product’s value proposition and establish any existing sales baselines to guide expectations.
Understanding the types of people or businesses who will be best suited for the product or service will help sales leaders map out qualification criteria, methods of prospecting and generating leads, and messaging guardrails for subsequent discovery meetings and negotiations.
It's helpful to create an ideal customer profile document along with messaging guidelines for each buyer persona. Anyone engaging with the business's audience should have access to this document.
2. Establish Goals and Milestones
Sales leaders need to establish goals that align with the company’s revenue goals as well as milestones for each leg of the sales process.
At this stage, it’s helpful to create a sales growth model and forecast. This helps sales leaders know how many leads to expect from marketing and how many sales reps and team members they'll need to accomplish these goals.
It will also help sales leaders understand which steps of the process need to be added, removed, or optimized to maximize efficiency and revenue.
3. Design Sales Processes
After establishing a target market and goals, sales leaders can begin designing a sales process.
- First, map out the customer journey and each discrete step the sales team needs to complete to take a lead to the subsequent stage. The above steps should provide a good outline, though each company will have its own steps.
- For each step, create the required scripts, materials, sales collateral, and training materials needed to execute the step.
- At the sales prospecting stage, create an ideal customer profile document, identify marketing and sales channels by which leads are generated, and procure a tool, usually a CRM, to store these leads.
- At the qualification stage, determine a lead scoring model that will define a lead as a good fit or bad fit lead, and if necessary, distinguish between marketing-qualified leads and sales-qualified leads. Also outline a process for handing off good fits leads to sales development reps for outreach.
- At the outreach, needs analysis, negotiation, and meeting stages, it’s helpful to include a script as well as sales enablement materials like slide deck templates or interactive product demos.
4. Communicate the Sales Process
Visualizing the sales process helps everyone on the team plus other departments need to understand the workflow.
Many tools exist to help visualize processes, such as Miro and Lucid Charts.
Here’s an example of a basic sales process including steps from lead generation through to won deals:
Sales leaders should also create centralized documentation for all support materials, such as slide deck templates and scripts.
5. Measure & Analyze Results
Finally, a sales process should evolve over time.
To effectively optimize a sales process, measurement needs to be in place. Most of this can be accomplished with a CRM to track data points like leads acquired, deals closed, customer lifetime value (CLV), average sale price (ASP), etc.
Over time, sales leaders can pinpoint steps in the process that could be optimized with additional scripting or support or changing the steps altogether.
Companies are evolving entities that expand to new products and verticals as well as new customer segments. Customer behavior changes as well, so it’s important to be agile with how sales teams sell.
When to Update a Sales Process
While sales processes are important, they shouldn't be treated as rigid rules that must be followed to the letter.
There'll be times when it’s appropriate to deviate from the sales process to adapt to changing customer needs or market conditions.
There are many cases where prospects will have an unusual request that'd still benefit the business involving a bit of improvisation or more personalized attention. A good sales leader or account executive knows when they can go off script to close the deal.
Why Implement a Sales Process?
The only way to scale a sales organization is through a process.
When done well, it maximizes the output from sales teams, allowing for optimization and innovation, enabling sales forecasting and predictable revenue, and making it easier to onboard and grow the sales organization.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives sellers the intelligence and targeting capabilities to close more deals, but foundationally, sales leaders need to build out a process that works for their unique circumstances.
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