How good is your sales process?
If your response to that is: ‘what is a sales process?’, then you have some work to do!
Briefly, your sales process should describe how you and your customer interact with one another from beginning to end.
Every opportunity is different, but your process should be defined and adaptable enough to every individual sale without the need to rewrite your approach completely. This matters far more for example in complex sales than for example e-commerce.
Your process should be:
✔ Sustainable (it is practical, doesn’t cost more than it delivers and should be something your people/tech can actually do)
✔ Repeatable (if it works, why wouldn’t you want to repeat it?)
✔ Mapped to the buying process (creating a sales process is pointless if it doesn’t suit your customers)
CRMs can help you with this and can start you off well, but ultimately you must tailor the process to your organisation and your customers.
So for example, your sales process could look like this (my example is a very simple one, but see how well it relates to what you have in place)
- Enquiry form via a website
- Enquiry comes into your email
- You phone the prospect to gain a broad understanding of their reasons for contacting you
- Schedule an appointment for the sales person
- Salesperson has discovery call, where they uncover wants and needs, propose a solution and close
- Deposit paid and paperwork sent
- Implement solution
- Gain customer feedback
There are many variations of this, but it’s important you do have SOMETHING in place!
Happy selling!