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The sales process has been so condensed and automated that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to identify the best way to sell your product. But understanding how people buy is a necessary skill for any business owner, and if you can master selling your products without in-person interaction, it could lead to more success than ever before.
A sales process is a series of actions that your company does to generate leads and complete sales. Your sales pipeline and funnel should be aligned with your company’s specific sales process, offering a blueprint for your sales staff to follow. Review your sales funnel, turn pipeline stage activities into sales process stages, visualize your sales process, and establish a system to track each step to create an effective sales process.
The four stages to building a sales process for your company are as follows:
1. Examine the Sales Pipeline Stages
Consider the customer’s journey and the nine steps of the sales funnel before attempting to identify what your company’s sales process looks like. After that, think about how each step ties to your company’s model.
You can also utilize your sales funnel to determine the broader groups of activities your team will need to do in order to nurture a lead through their customer journey.
2. Make a list of each stage’s internal activities.
The next step in creating a sales process is to clarify how each stage relates to your company and to determine the sales activities that your company will engage in at each stage. Depending on what’s required to finalize the deal, certain phases may include many actions, while others may just have one. It’s also worth mentioning that if your company chooses to outsource tasks in a stage, certain stages may not have any internal activities.
To construct the list of actions your company will utilize as part of its sales process, ask yourself the following questions for each pipeline step. You may additionally extend each pipeline step for additional recommendations and activities:
Prospective customers: How do you intend to locate prospective clients (consumers, companies, or both) who could benefit from your product or service?
Any actions that lead to new or more information about a lead or prospect should be counted when identifying the stages involved in the researching prospects stage. There are no restrictions on how information is obtained—it might come from an internet source, a cold call, a printed magazine, a face-to-face contact, or any other method.
Here are some sales process stages that are related to this pipeline stage:
- During a networking event, collect business cards to enter into your CRM
- On LinkedIn, you may find and connect with prospective decision-makers.
- Looking for the CEO’s phone number and email address on a company’s website
- Putting together a list of email addresses and phone numbers from people you met during a trade fair
Prospect research helps you generate customer profiles that you may use in your sales process. Customer profiles allow you to personalize your sales approach based on habits, interests, and demographic data. This allows you to produce more quality leads, increasing your chances of converting leads into closed business and turning the closed business into recurring income.
If you’re providing a subscription-based food delivery service, for example, you could create profiles for each client type based on the kind of food they prefer in their subscription package. You may then adjust promotions depending on interest kinds to make customized offers that are more likely to appeal to a certain client profile after they’ve been segmented.
The initial phase in the sales targeting process is customer profile.
How will you build or collect contact lists of prospective clients while generating web leads?
Consider any actions that bring inbound leads or assemble contact information for you when building sales process steps in the generating web leads stage. Employing internet advertising, purchasing lead lists, networking, and using content marketing are just a few examples. Cross-team coordination between sales and marketing departments may be required during this stage, especially when employing search-optimized content or landing pages to generate website traffic.
Here are some sales process stages that are related to this pipeline stage:
- Creating a landing page for inbound lead submissions using an online webform
- Online web form submissions are automatically synced with your CRM database for sales rep assignments and your email marketing platform for nurturing campaigns.
- Purchasing and uploading tailored contact lead lists from an internet database to your CRM
UpLead is a fantastic tool for building lead contact lists. UpLead is an online database that allows you to buy accurate and up-to-date contact information for B2B leads based on factors like industry, job title, location, and company. When opposed to manually seeking contact information for leads, this saves you hours of time.
Pro tip: Purchasing leads is simply one of several lead creation tactics available. Other strategies to keep your sales funnel filled are explained in our definitive guide to lead creation.
Product and service introductions: How do you wish to promote your company and its goods or services to potential customers?
Different actions in your sales process, such as cold calling, bulk or tailored email marketing, or even door-to-door selling, are used to introduce your company’s goods or services. Which strategies you use are determined by your own preferences, client kinds, and sales approach.
A sales technique is a collection of guidelines for how to behave throughout the sales process. You may, for example, utilize the Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff (SPIN) selling technique to uncover pain spots and solutions when promoting goods or services. Because it often needs back-and-forth dialogue, this tactic works best in a cold calling scenario with direct interaction with a prospect.
Here are some sales process stages that are related to this pipeline stage:
- Making cold calls to set up software demonstrations
- To raise awareness of your company’s distinctive approach, send mass email introductions to contacts from a trade fair.
- During an on-site visit at the lead’s office or online, introducing a new product.
Pro tip: When done at the proper times, to the right individuals, and with the correct approaches, cold calling may be incredibly successful.
Lead qualification: How will you know whether a prospect is qualified to buy and to what extent they are interested in your products?
Any steps that assist you to identify whether a prospect is interested in what your firm provides, measuring the prospect’s interest level, and determining when a lead is ready to buy utilizing lead scoring are included in the sales process step for qualifying leads. It’s also crucial to understand the distinction between the two kinds of qualified leads.
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that fits your target population in general, regardless of whether they have indicated any direct interest. Sales qualified leads (SQL) have progressed through the pipeline and sales process to the point where they are (or will soon be) ready to buy from your company.
Here are some sales process stages that are related to this pipeline stage:
- A cold call to a lead to see whether or not they are interested in obtaining a product brochure
- To determine whether a marketing qualified lead wants to organize a product demo, send them an email.
- Checking LinkedIn to see whether a lead’s company meets your desired profile of 25- to 50-employee companies
Lead nurturing: How will you follow up with leads over time and develop connections with them?
Every sales process should contain methods to continually nurture leads as part of a complete sales strategy. Lead nurturing activities help prospects remember what your company has to offer depending on where they are in the sales funnel. Because the aim is to progress the connection to the next level, lead nurturing happens at many phases of the sales funnel.
The following are some examples of sales process phases related to lead nurturing:
- Drip email campaigns are used to keep leads up to date on current promotional offers.
- After a series of drip emails, contact the prospect to check whether they’re ready for a demo or trial.
- Sending a personal email to a prospect, mentioning fresh research or data related to their company or your product or service offers, in order to create a connection.
Emailing is a great technique to nurture leads by following up on them on a regular basis. CRMs make it possible to compose and send bulk emails on an automatic basis while also tracking their effectiveness.
Delivering sales presentations: How will you illustrate what your company has to offer, as well as how will you give early sales pitches?
Anything that conveys how your company can assist your clients may be included in a sales presentation. It might include anything from product demos and free trials to just selling a product or service over the phone.
Here are some sales process stages that are related to this pipeline stage:
- delivering a sales presentation on the capabilities and benefits of our industrial printers
- During a video call, provide a demo of your software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.
- On a conference call with a prospect, I’m presenting insurance coverage alternatives.
When giving a sales presentation, having a ready-to-use sales pitch to steer the discussion in the proper direction is critical.
How will you explain the pricing of your goods or services, as well as your conditions, when sending proposals or quotes?
This step of the pipeline includes operations such as generating quotations, defining terms and conditions, and delivering them to the prospect for approval. This stage may also include background operations such as filing a formal business proposal, performing a legal review for contract conditions, or utilizing an appraiser to finalize an estimate for certain firms.
Here are some sales process stages that are related to this pipeline stage:
- Obtaining underwriting information from prospects in order to enter it into your system for quote generation
- Sending a prospect a formal proposition for financial counseling services for signing.
- calculating the number of “seats” for a software package purchased by a sales team
Sending professional-looking proposals helps you stand out among the other bidders. Fiverr links you with freelance copywriters and graphic designers for quality copywriting and design work. Before sending your ideas to potential customers, make sure they are correctly structured and designed.
Style guidelines for Fiverr brands are now available for purchase (Source: Fiverr)
Pro tip: Having the correct software to assist with things like quotation proposal production is critical to increasing the efficiency of your sales operation.
Negotiating terms: What will you do if a prospect requests that terms be customized and/or expenses be reduced?
There may be phases in your sales process involved with negotiating conditions or the pricing of your goods and services, which is more prevalent in bigger purchases. This step may also need working with other departments like legal or accounting, as well as sending the prospect modifications.
Here are some sales process stages that are related to this pipeline stage:
- Requests for term changes from prospects should be reviewed by your legal department.
- Replying to a prospect with changed proposal parameters
- Adding a new scope of work and cost to an existing proposal
Closing the deal: How will you verify that you have contract signatures, money, and a client onboarded?
Activities that include closing a transaction with a prospect or onboarding them as a client might be considered sales process stages at this point of the funnel. Closing a contract for some organizations may include collecting cash or issuing a one-time invoice to a customer, while for others, numerous departments may be involved.
Here are some sales process stages that are related to this pipeline stage:
- Adding a signed proposal to your database and presenting a new client to your account manager
- Customer information is sent to the accounting department for billing.
- Creating a schedule for new customers to get software training
3. Create a visual representation of your sales process
After you’ve made your master list of tasks, check to see which ones may be accomplished straight away and which ones need completion of previous activity. Visualizing the process using flowcharts distinguished by shapes and colors that direct the observer along the route from start to end is one approach to achieve this. As your team grows, it will be simpler to educate new agents on your sales process.
An example of a sales process flow chart is shown below:
4. Make Your Sales Process Measurable & Adjust as Needed
The final step in creating a winning sales process is to find ways to measure the success of each step. Once each stage in the pipeline has been defined with required activities and displayed in a way that is easy for your sales team to follow, the last step is to find ways to measure the success of each step. To quantify your sales process, you may utilize a variety of metrics such as total values, conversion rates, and averages.
Metrics like these help you track progress and identify areas where your sales process could be improved. Adjustments might include things like improving the efficiency of sales process stages, introducing new strategies or eliminating inefficient activities, or educating sales agents on how to enhance their sales figures in various elements of the sales process.
To monitor a lead’s journey through a company’s sales process phases and arrange lead contact information, customer relationship management (CRM) software should be seriously examined. To track the development of their unique sales process, most CRM users may establish bespoke funnel phases.
Users may edit data fields, set win probability, and utilize additional features for a sales opportunity or lead, such as the possible transaction value and assigned sales rep, in HubSpot, for example. On the contact list view, which can be modified to reflect the lead’s current state, businesses may also keep track of where leads are in the sales process.
Customization of the HubSpot sales process (Source: HubSpot)
Example of Using Metrics to Adjust Sales Processes
Consider a sales team that is unable to meet sales targets due to a lack of MQLs in the pipeline at any one moment. When they look at the sales process analytics, they find that inside sales agents only have enough time to complete enough web research to generate 15 marketing-qualified leads per day, which is far less than what they need to meet their sales objectives.
The sales manager of the team chooses to eliminate the online research part of the sales process and instead purchase 300 targeted leads from an online database every week to create MQLs. She then assigns the introduction of services to the inside sales representatives, who now have more time, by cold contacting fresh prospects to set up sales presentations for the outside salespeople.
Example of Metrics in Sales Coaching
Individual performance coaching is another example of how analytics may be utilized to enhance sales operations. Charlie, a new sales development representative, has the lowest conversion rates of calls to qualifying leads of anybody on the team, according to the sales manager.
Charlie receives an hour of one-on-one coaching from his boss each day to go through sales tactics and conversion rate suggestions. Charlie starts adopting the new approaches, such as dialing cold calls at peak call times, using emotive selling language, and asking questions to deal with prospect concerns. Over time, he and his boss see that his individual performance improves.
A sales manager’s work entails constantly improving your sales organization via training and plan revisions. You’ll discover all you need to know about onboarding sales representatives, inspiring sales teams, and controlling your company’s sales success with our complete guide to sales management.
Conclusion
Review which sales pipeline phases are important to your organization and combine the methods you intend to utilize in order to define the steps of your sales process. You’ll have a repeatable set of tasks to do in order to move a sales opportunity from a fresh lead to a completed contract after you’ve developed your sales process.
Your sales process may be improved even further by making it an observable sales system with performance indicators at each stage. These analytics may be utilized to make changes to the sales process as well as to teach individual salespeople.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you create an effective sales process?
By following a rigorous sales process, you can create an effective sales strategy. This is because your entire team will be moving forward with the same goal in mind.
