A sales process is a set of repeatable steps that your sales team takes to convert a prospect into a customer. Having a standardized sales process adds structure and accountability to your sales activities, leading to higher win rates and shorter sales cycles. Not having a clear road-map on how to engage your prospects and guide them through a structured evaluation of your products and services can be detrimental to your sales pipeline causing loss of revenue due to disorganization.
According to Harvard Business Review companies with a formal sales process can increase revenue by at least 28%. Research conducted by Vantage Point Performance and the Sales Management Association revealed that 44% of executives think their organization is ineffective at managing their sales pipelines.
The sales pipeline at its most basic level is merely a representation of a company's sales process. So giving your sales team a clear and repeatable process to follow can have a variety of positive impacts on your organization, its effectiveness and ultimately your bottom-line.
So what are some of the positive impacts of having a clearly defined and repeatable sales process. First, it gives your team a structured path to follow, clearly defining where they are in a current sales engagement and where they need to go. A standardize process can also make it faster to onboard new staff taking some of the training burden off of sales managers and reducing the number of lone wolves, out in the field "winging it" on sales calls. Accountability and insight into your sales team's performance can also be increased as a standardized process provides more data points to measure allowing for deeper tracking and more robust sales performance analytics. Most importantly a well structured process can result in more qualified leads, consistent win-rates, dependable sales forecasting and shorter sales cycles which will lead to higher revenue.
So, for all the organizations out there struggling with your sales pipeline now might be the time to get your sales processes in order and for those fortunate few that do have an effective repeatable sales process in place the work is not done. You must continue to improve and refine that process with measurable feed back based on data to continue to evolve as a sales organization.
All that being said I'd like to hear from you? How are you laying the foundation to ensure that your sales prospects have a positive experience from first contact to close? What steps are you taking to ensure that your organization has a clear and defined sales process in place? And lastly how are you continuing to refine that process and evolve as a sales team?
-Franklin De La Cruz
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