Sales Process - A Biggie for any Sales Team and their Sales Leader

This week I’m sharing with you my week in the life of a fractional sales leader which includes what I have seen during my working day, as well as my daily exercise routine.

One clear theme emerged during my past week as a fractional sales leader which I will share a bit more about soon;

1. Sales Process

But first. My week of exercise which has been far less than I would have liked, but due to some niggles with my knee and shoulder. The good news is that I have continued to manage my 25 sit-ups each day. I haven’t resumed my push-ups yet because I am receiving physio on my right shoulder and neck, oh and physio on my knee! I did manage some cycling and walking totalling 25km each respectively, which the physio supported.

Anyway back to my themes from the week;

1. Sales Process

Salespeople, ore often than not, chase or follow the money. They know that by in large signed proposals lead to commissions. But its getting from start to finish which requires discipline and process. Over the years I have experienced or seen some pretty complex sales processes which don’t do the sales person or the client many favours. Remember we, the sales person, is the professional seller, and the client is a buyer, and not necessarily a professional buyer, so having both a sales process and a buying process aligned with each other helps a lot!

The Sales process that I most often use and encourage is one of qualification, discovery, demo, proposal, negotiation, and closed won.

Often when a new sales person starts a role, their own qualification is low because they want to get as much into their CRM as possible and demonstrate their effective with sales opportunities. Wrong! This is exactly where a well-defined qualification process needs to be established first and foremost. While this is hard to say and stomach, using the well-defined qualification process, you are trying hard to Dis-qualify opportunities from entering your sales process so that you can focus on the well-qualified ones.

Ok great. We now have well-qualified opportunities in our sales funnel. Now we need to complete discovery, think investigation, detective work, research, curiosity. We need to find out everything we can about this prospect or clients needs. Their pains. What problems they are looking to solve? Why are they talking to us? Who else are they talking to? Who are these people in the room? What are their backgrounds? Are you just here to make up the 3 vendors that they need to get proposals from to make their un-informed decision because they already have a preferred vendor in mind?

So in Discovery there is yet another opportunity to qualify-out! Am I wasting my time here? Cull them if so, and move on to your next opportunity. There is no time to waste.

Demo’s can go really wrong. Be careful! Think of an opportunity to demonstrate as a sports game. You need to prepare well and practice or rehearse with your teammates. Do not ever just turn up and hope the demo hits the mark. Even demo after demo, tried and tested requires preparation. Also don’t do discovery in the demo. You may learn more from their questions during the demo, but the demo is the demo, so don’t come into the demo with more questions which you should have used and completed during discovery. Also absolutely sent an agenda for the demo, find out who is attending and their roles and wishes from the demo. Keep the demo high-level unless there is an expression of particular interest.

Proposals should never just be sent by email or post and left like that. Once the proposal leaves you, you have lost complete control on how the proposal is interpreted and who is reading the proposal. My tried and tested approach is to present the proposal face to face or on Teams. Run through from page 1 to the end with your prospect or client and gauge their interest and their comments. You might have missed proposing something or over-proposed and complicated the proposals. Get their feedback, make any changes, and then and only then, send the proposal through by email as a final. If you are clever use PandaDocs, Lumin, Docusign, etc to send the proposal so you can track engagement – open, pages viewed, most common pages viewed, least common pages viewed, etc. Then of course there are alerts with these proposal applications which can tell you immediately when the proposal is opened and even who has opened the proposal especially when the proposal has been forwarded on within the organisation.

Negotiations are definitely not about price. If you have done a good job during discovery and demo, then value would have been recognised by the client and the value prop would have got stronger and stronger during the sales process. At any time, should price come up and a phrase like “Seems expensive” surface, then I often ask “Compared to what?” and then I start talking about the value proposition I can provide which should far outway any pricing objections.

Do negotiate on commitment terms, go-live date, start-date, signing date. Always work backwards with the client from the date they want their business using and benefiting from your product or solution. A remember whatever you Give, you must receive something back from them. A Give-Get!

Finally the win. By now you have traversed negotiations and the client is at the pointy end of the sales process. When will they sign? Who will sign? What’s stopping them from signing today? Why is there a specific date set for signing? You relationship with the client will be quite strong now and you will know a lot more about each other. Keep this commercial but be mindful that they are human too and have other priorities. Obviously your priority is their signature.

When you win make sure you have a win review so you can learn why you were selected. Equally so, if you lost at the very end following negations, which I would be very surprised to hear, then you need to have a loss review. No opting out of this. The prospect has a right to meet and debrief you.

Either way, prepare your questions and send the questions to them ahead of time so they can be prepared. You want to be able to well document all your wins and all your losses in CRM.

So that was a small sample of my week. Let me know if you would like to discuss any of my observed themes.