How to Improve Your Sales Process

Compliments of our partner from HubSpot

 A sales process refers to a series of repeatable steps a sales team takes to move a prospect from an early-stage lead to a closed customer. A strong sales process helps reps consistently close deals by giving them a framework to follow.

How to Improve Your Sales Process

• ·         Analyze your current sales process.                                         

• ·         Outline the buyer’s journey for your target persona.                                         

• ·         Define the prospect action that moves them to the next stage.                                         

• ·         Define exit criteria for each step of the sales process.                                         

• ·         Measure your sales process results.

These best practices will help you improve the impact of your sales process across your team and customer base.

1.      Analyze your current sales process.

This one might go without saying — but if you‘re going to iterate and improve upon your existing sales process, you need to know why you need to change it in the first place. Consider what is and isn’t working for your sales reps to tailor your new process to better fit their needs.

It's easier said than done, but you need to audit your existing process and identify as many gaps and inefficiencies as possible — that can start with you observing your reps as they work. Look back at the last five or ten deals you closed. What did these deals look like from beginning to end? What were the touchpoints with the customer?

Consider roughly how long the entire process took and how much time elapsed between each step. The more examples you have (and the more people on your team those examples come from), the better. Once you've outlined that timeline, work backward to understand the timeframe for each deal. For example, if six of those ten deals closed in approximately six weeks, take a look at the average steps to get there during that period.

Hot Tip: Working backward might look something like this:

• ·         One week of deliberation before a signed contract (during the “closing” step)

• ·         Three to five follow-up emails and phone calls (during the “handling objections” step)

• ·         One demo (during the “presenting” step)

• ·         One phone call and two to three emails (during the “researching” step)

• ·         One discovery call (during the “connecting” step)

• ·         Two warm emails and three phone calls to prospect (during the “prospecting” step)

You can also dig a bit deeper to understand the subtle motivations and pain points that drove each deal to close.

2.            Outline the buyer’s journey for your target persona.

The nature of your persona's buyer's journey — the progression a prospect takes between becoming aware of your offering and actually buying it — is going to be at least somewhat specific to your offering.

Different businesses appeal to different types of buyers for different reasons — even if they exist in the same competitive landscape. So naturally, you need to understand the unique nature of how your ideal buyer becomes aware of your solution, considers it, and ultimately decides how and whether to purchase it.

It’s worth taking a look at your marketing analytics. It helps pinpoint how leads move throughout the buyer’s journey — from identifying the traffic sources and marketing campaigns that bring in the most revenue to seeing what web pages users visit the most, and more. Having this understanding of where your ideal buyer is coming from and why your solution might appeal to them will help you create a more focused, effective sales process. You‘ll have a better sense of the ways they like to be contacted, the kind of messaging they’re most receptive to, the typical pain points they face, the objections they generally raise, and why they actually would buy your solution.

Hot Tip: Consider running surveys of your existing customers to get a sense of the rationale behind their purchase decision and any friction points they might have had when buying.

3.                  Define the prospect action that moves them to the next stage.

A sales process is a progression — a series of stages separated by specific actions. If you want your sales process to be seamless, effective, and predictable, you need to know exactly what those actions are. Understand what causes a prospect to move from one stage to the next in your sales process. Ideally, the actions that move opportunities through the Pipeline will be based on those prospects‘ actions — not a sales rep’s hunches or perception.

Hot Tip: Ask the following questions to determine the actions that move prospects from stage to stage:

• ·         “While conducting warm outreach, did a rep hit on a specific pain point that motivated the prospect to schedule a discovery call?”

• ·         “During the demo, were there objections that stalled the deal or features that moved it forward?”

• ·         “When a rep made a pitch, was the answer an immediate ‘yes’ from the customer? If so, consider carefully why that happened. How did they build up to the pitch?"

4.                  Define exit criteria for each step of the sales process.

This step is essentially a more concrete extension of the previous one. Once you have a sense of the actions that prompt a progression in your sales process, establish the actual action items that your reps need to fulfill to deem a prospect ready for the next step. For example, suppose you're working through the “presenting” step. In that case, your reps might determine they need a specific type of content — such as customer testimonial videos — to share with your prospects to move them to “closing.”

Hot Tip: When determining exit criteria for each step of the sales process, consider the following questions to ensure all of your reps have the same information. That way, they’ll provide all of your prospects with positive, professional, and on-brand information.

• ·         What information should reps know about your brand, what they're selling, and your sales process steps before getting in contact with a prospect?

• ·         What actions should your reps take throughout each step of the sales process?

• ·         What should your reps say throughout each step of the sales process? Make sure your reps are aware of the multiple ways a conversation could potentially go and that they know how to manage all of them.

• ·         What specific types of content should your reps show your prospects during different steps of the sales process? This is especially important in the “presenting” stage, where your reps might need to provide your prospects with videos, blogs, testimonials, or case studies to move that prospect to close.

5.                  Measure your sales process results.

Your sales process will evolve as your team finds ways to work more efficiently and move prospects through your pipeline faster. As you define and enhance your sales process, you’ll want to measure your success to ensure it successfully coordinates your team's efforts and reaches your target audience. For example, note how many prospects transitioned in and out of each step of the sales process over a given period. This way, you can conclude, “In July, we started with 75 prospects in the ‘awaiting demo’ step ... at the end of the month, we had moved through 28 prospects and added 19, leaving us with 66 prospects in the ‘awaiting demo’ step."

Here are some other examples of metrics to consider for the different steps of your process:

• ·         The average time prospects stay in each step

• ·         The step (if any) that takes too long for prospects to move out of

• ·         The percentage of prospects who close after a demo

• ·         The percentage of prospects who request a demo after a discovery call

• ·         The churn rate (i.e., if certain customers are churning quickly, how can you use this data to identify mismatched prospects early in the sales process?)

These are the basic metrics most teams find value in measuring. Give some thought to metrics specific to your business that will help you define success or the need for improvement in a particular step.

Hot Tip: Another great way to measure your results is with the three levels of sales process success. Determining which level of success you're in will provide you with more insight into what you need to fine-tune for your team and prospects regarding your sales process.

Level 1: Humming

Your sales process is humming when 80% or more of your reps are hitting their quota every month. This is also when all of your new hires are being ramped up quickly to target performance, and your team isn't providing you with any negative feedback about the sales process.

Level 2: Experimenting

Experimenting is when your sales process isn‘t quite humming, so your team is experimenting and testing different tactics to determine what’s most effective. For example, a team might be experimenting with different modes of contact in the “connecting” step of the sales process to get sales discussions going with prospects. They can test whether or not their prospects respond best to a specific email template when starting a discussion with a rep.

Level 3: Thrashing

Thrashing is when a team is rapidly moving from one solution to another within a specific sales process. Thrashing is ineffective and something you‘ll want to ensure your team gets out of as quickly as possible if you’re ever experiencing it.  For example, your reps might be trying different presentation techniques in the “presenting” stage, making it impossible to determine what's working for the majority of prospects Remember, your sales process is never perfect, but it should constantly be evolving to fit the needs of your team, business, and prospects. Now if you have a sales process already, but haven’t mapped it out yet, here’s where to start."

Dr. Millicent Brooks and the Elite Shedload Collective believe that it is through increasing profits – NOT REVENUE – is the single biggest factor in crushing the competition. 

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