Implementing business processes can streamline the completion of any simple or complex task. Processes can also make your employees more efficient, consistent, and accurate in their roles and interactions with your customers.
The benefits of processes in business apply to your sales department as well. A sales process that complements your business, sales representatives, customers, and products or services will allow you to boost conversions, close more deals, and ensure all of your reps are providing customers with positive and consistent experiences — no matter who they're talking to.
However, building a scalable and repeatable sales process can be tough, especially because every business, sales team, and target audience is unique.
We've created this guide to help you. Below, you'll find the best tactics to create and map a sales process tailored to your business that works for both your sales team and target audience.
Let's dive in.
Before we cover the details of creating and mapping your sales process, let's review the answer to a question that may come up as you begin working on your sales process: What's the difference between a sales process and a sales methodology?
Sales Process vs. Sales Methodology
Understanding the distinction between a sales process and sales methodology is important as they're both important terms. Although they're closely related, a sales process and sales methodology are two different things.
A sales process, as we reviewed earlier, is a concrete set of actions your sales team follows to close a new customer.
A sales methodology is the framework for how your sales process is to be carried out and how it will help your business grow.
Here's a diagram to help you visualize this:
Think of your sales process as the high-level map of the steps your team takes, while your sales methodologies are the different ways your team can approach the sales process.
Sales Methodologies
Choosing a sales methodology sets the foundation for your team as they approach their work and sales process. Although it's not a necessary part of your process, your business might choose to incorporate one since they are another way to streamline your customer's buyer journey and ensure professional, impactful, and helpful interactions between those customers and your sales team occur.
Here are some of the most popular sales methodologies for your consideration.
Challenger Sales Methodology
The Challenger Sales method is an approach to sales that says the seller, or Challenger, must teach the prospect. Sellers learn about a customer's business, tailor their selling techniques to their needs and pain points, and challenge any of their preconceptions throughout the process.
Solution Selling
Solution selling requires reps to focus solely on the customer's pain points instead of the products or services they're selling. Products are framed as solutions and emphasis is placed on what a resolution for the customer's pain point would look like.
Consultative Selling
Consultative selling places emphasis on the salesperson becoming a trusted advisor to the customer, gaining authority and trust over time. Consultative selling happens when sales align with the customer's buying experience — it's defined by the customer-rep relationship.
Inbound Selling
The inbound sales approach is characterized by attracting buyers with tailored and relevant content rather than advertising irrelevant messages and hoping they'll buy.
The Inbound Sales Methodology
With so many choices in today's marketplace, it's important for sales teams to put the needs of their buyers ahead of their own. The inbound approach came from the belief that:
- Buyers can now find most of the information (online or elsewhere) they need about a company's products or services before they ever engage with a salesperson.
- Buyers have become better at blocking out cold and interruptive sales techniques (cold calls and irrelevant sales emails, for example).
- Buyers have heightened expectations around the experience of buying. They can control the experience and move through the process largely on their own timeline.
These shifts in buying trends are all examples of how buyers have seized control of the sales process from the sales reps who once held all the power. With these changes in mind, it's important for sales teams to adopt a more helpful, human approach to selling — or inbound selling.
Now that we've covered the difference between a sales process and methodology, let's review the steps of the sales process so you can begin developing one for your team.
1. Prospecting
Prospecting is the process of sourcing new, early-stage leads to begin working through the sales process with. It's a vital part of the sales process and part of most reps' daily or weekly workflow.
Prospecting might involve online research on sites like LinkedIn or Quora. It also might take place at conferences or industry events. Additionally, you can prospect by asking current clients or colleagues to refer individuals who might be interested in your product or service.
2. Connecting
The connect step of the sales process involves reps initiating contact with those early stage leads to gather information and decide whether or not they're a good-fit lead for your business and whether or not they'll likely move forward in the buyer's journey. A rep can typically determine this over a "connect" or "discovery" call (sometimes over email if not via phone).
To do this, a rep might ask:
- "Tell me about your role."
- "What do you do day-to-day?"
- "What problem are you trying to solve?"
- "Why is this a priority for your business?"
3. Researching
Next comes the research step. Learning more about your prospect and their company as they progress through the sales process can help your reps offer a more tailored and personal experience to improve the likelihood of closing a deal.
This might require a rep to speak with other people at the company in different departments to get a holistic view of the business and their objectives. Many longtime reps say a good salesperson understands the company as a whole better than the individual prospect who works there.
4. Presenting
Most salespeople, across industries, will run a formal presentation or demonstration of whatever it is they're selling for the prospect. This step is time-consuming, so it typically comes deeper in the sales process and is reserved for more serious prospects. (You don't want your reps wasting any of their valuable time if it's clearly avoidable).
A presentation should be tailored to meet the specific prospect's unique use case and pain points. Additionally, a rep might bring an engineer or executive to the meeting with them to demonstrate the level of service the customer will receive when doing business with your company. This also allows them to answer more technical questions the rep might not be best suited to comment on.
5. Closing
This step of the sales process refers to any late-stage activities that happen as a deal approaches closing. It varies widely from company to company and may include things like delivering a quote or proposal, negotiation, or achieving the buy-in of decision-makers.
The close step is what every salesperson works toward. It should result in a mutually-beneficial, contractual agreement between the prospect and the seller. Once a deal closes, the salesperson receives a commission on the price they negotiated with the customer, and the account usually passes to an account manager or customer success representative.
Now that we've covered the steps of the sales process, let's discuss how you can map those steps.
How to Map the Sales Process
Mapping your sales process will allow you to clearly identify and clarify each of the sales process steps (as reviewed in the above section). This way, your team will develop a sustainable strategy suitable for long-term growth.
When you map your sales process, you answer the "why" behind every decision you make in your sales process. This is critical because your sales process is the foundation of everything your team does.
1. Analyze your current sales process.
The first step in mapping your sales process involves analyzing your current process. You'll want to consider what is and isn't working for your reps and prospects to tailor your new process to better fit their needs, so more deals are closed and more customers are delighted.
Here are some ways to analyze the success of your current sales process.
Observe your reps as they work through the sales process.
Look back at the last five or 10 deals you closed. What did these deals look like from beginning to end? What were the touch points 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 identified that timeline, work backward to understand the timeline for each deal. For example, if six of those 10 deals closed in approximately six weeks, take a look at what the average steps were to get there during that time period. 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 closing 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.
Define the prospect action that moves them to the next stage.
You'll want to have a clear understanding of what causes a prospect to move from one stage to the next to really understand your sales process. Ideally, the reason or cause will be based on the actions of the prospect, not the perception of the sales rep.
To determine the action that moves prospects to the next stage, ask the following questions:
- "While conducting warm outreach, did a rep hit on a specific pain point(s) that motivated the prospect to schedule a discovery call?"
- "During the demo, were there objections that stalled the deal or featured 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?
Now that you have a better understanding of your current sales process, you should look at the buyer's journey from the perspective of your target persona.
2. Lay out the buyer’s journey for your target persona.
Lay out the buyer's journey for your target audience, or your buyer personas. This will allow you to look at your sales process from the perspective of your customers. You'll be able to get a better understanding of the interactions they have with your reps, the pain points they experience, and why they need your product or service.
When you lay out the buyer's journey for your target persona you'll gain insight into how you can tailor your sales process to ensure your team has everything they need to build strong relationships with prospects and close more deals.
3. Define exit criteria for each step of the sales process.
Next, define exit criteria for each step of the sales process for your team. This means you should identify the things that need to happen for your prospects to move from one step of your sales process to the next. You can refer to the sales process steps and the steps of the buyer's journey (as mentioned above) to get started with this.
For example, if you're working through the "presenting" step, 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".
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 so they can provide all of your prospects with positive, professional, and on-brand information.
-
What should reps know?
What information should reps know about your brand, whatever it is they're selling, and your sales process steps prior to getting in contact with a prospect? -
What should your reps do?
What actions should your reps take throughout each step of the sales process? -
What should your reps say?
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 should your reps show?
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" step, where your reps might need to provide your prospects with videos, blogs, testimonials, or case studies to move that prospect to close.
4. Measure your sales process results.
It’s likely 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 over time, you’ll want to measure your success to ensure your sales process is successful in coordinating the efforts of your team and reaching your target audience.
For example, look at how many prospects transitioned into and out of each step of the sales process in a given time period. This way you can draw conclusions like, “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 vet for this mismatched prospect 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.
Another great way to measure your results is with the three levels of sales process success.
3 Levels of Sales Process Success
Determining which level of success you're in will provide you with more insight into what it is you need to fine tune for your team and prospects in terms of your sales process. The three levels of success include humming, experimenting, and thrashing.
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.
2. Experimenting
Experimenting is when your sales process isn't quite humming, so your team is experimenting and testing different tactics within the steps of the sales process to determine what's most effective for reps.
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 to see whether or not their prospects respond best to a specific email template when getting a discussion started with a rep.
3. Thrashing
Thrashing is when a team is rapidly moving from one solution to another within a specific step of the 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 really determine what's working for the majority of prospects.
Remember, your sales process is never perfect. It should always be evolving to fit the needs of your team, business, and prospects. Speaking of being open to analyzing and updating your sales process, let's take a look at some common mistakes businesses make when developing their sales processes as well as some tips for success.
Sales Process Common Mistakes
Review the following common mistakes and tips for success to help you develop a sales process ideal for both your team and customers.
1. Leaving your sales process steps open to interpretation.
It’s important to define specific, concrete actions that move your business's prospects from one stage to the next. If you don't identify these triggers, your sales team might come away with a less than accurate understanding of what is and isn't working for prospects, potentially causing them to mishandle part of the process.
Once you define your sales process, document it, share it, and practice it with your team. Try role-play exercises to drive home the valuable techniques they should be taking during each step.
2. Expecting just one sales methodology (if you use one) to be the "silver bullet”.
While some teams choose to stick with and follow one methodology closely, others choose to study several popular sales methodologies and combine bits and pieces they find useful from each.
Regardless of which approach you take, it’s a good idea to stay aware of what's new and changing over time. As the needs and desires of buyers and your business change, different approaches, methodologies, and ways of managing your sales process will fall into and out of favor.
On that note, it's important to remember your entire sales process is also ever changing.
3. Forgetting your sales process will always be a work in progress.
Your sales process is never complete or perfect. It should always be a work in progress. So, in addition to consistently measuring your success, you should also have check-ins with your reps, who are working through your sales process every day and communicating with prospects, on a regular basis to ensure they haven't uncovered any major issues or red flags in regards to your process.
Remember, continually developing and improving your sales process will make the work of your reps more straightforward and improve the interactions and experiences your customers have with your reps and business as a whole.
Begin Working on Your Sales Process
Creating and mapping a sales process will help your sales team close more deals and convert more leads. This will also ensure your team provides every prospect with the same type of consistent experience, representative of your brand.
Follow these steps to create and map a sales process tailored to your business, sales team, and customers to begin boosting conversions and building lasting relationships today.
For more on sales processes, take this free on-demand sales training course or download this sales process cheat sheet.
