Sales Process Design
A Sales Process Design is an effort to create a comprehensive resource to assist both veteran and new sales employees maximize their sales capabilities, while helping a company efficiently and effectively grow.
A Sales Process, when used in conjunction with the Sales Playbook, guides a sales organization toward success and optimizes the time spent selling.
Sales Process Design is also intended to accelerate the onboarding of new employees and their contributions to our company and customers.
Company growth depends on the sales engine running . The goal is to ramp sellers’ knowledge of a company’s procedures and become familiar with its cadence and policies as quickly as possible.
The faster salespeople master a sales process design, the faster they can exceed objectives and earn commissions.
A sales process design begins with understanding the fundamentals of a business before any introduction of solutions, services or products, including:
- Company Mission
- The business they are in
- Their people and how they reflect the company’s unique culture and
- The company’s values, particularly how they relate to customer service.
Establish the Sales Process
The methodology for compiling a modern sales process begins with four specific components that require cross-functional introspection, analysis and consensus.
1. Ideal Customer Profile analysis
An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a description of the purchasing company that’s a perfect fit for your solution — not the individual buyer or end user.
Your ICP should focus on relevant characteristics of your target accounts, such as:
- Industry/vertical
- Geography
- Annual revenue
- Size of their customer base
- Employee headcount (companywide and within key departments)
- Budget
- Technology they use
- Level of organizational or technological maturity
Nail the profile of the ideal customer, the customers’ pain points and preferences and the critical business issues customers are trying to solve.
2. Buying process
Identify conditions or events that trigger buyer consideration, evaluation, and purchase. What are the behaviors of a qualified opportunity?
3. Company offer and value proposition
Describe and clarify what your company offers and the ways in which your products and services address the customer’s pain points and business issues.
Clearly define:
What problems do customers face that we solve better than anyone else?
What value do we create through the entire life cycle of their buying process, implementation, renewal and expansion?
4. Competitive analysis
Detail how competitors position themselves in the market, their selling process, typical moves by each competitor, and recommendations on how to counter these moves.
An open, analytical approach directed from the top tends to unify the leadership team as much as it informs sales process. The answers that arise from this examination reveal much about the culture of your company. In this quest for customer insight, the values of the organization become apparent.
These derive from the evident leadership principles that ultimately set the tone for operational behavior. As is always the case, values, like culture, flows from the top down.
Once a consensus emerges on these critical elements, it is time to overlay these onto a portable, repeatable sales process.
Recognize that in today’s markets, however, neither companies nor their sales organizations successfully dictate the sales process.
The complex B2B sales process has become a buyer process that requires awareness and sensitivity to the new question: “How do our buyers want to buy?” All we really know is that we must replace the traditional sales waterfall stages of prospect/qualify/present/demo/propose/close with the relevant action steps, events, milestones, supporting assets and timing to which the preferred buyers will most likely respond.
Phases of the Sales Process
Typically these are website visitors. The company may have drawn visitors in any number of ways: Website/Organic Search/SEO, Blog, Tradeshow, PayPerClick/SEM.
They may also have been drawn by sales prospecting, references from customers or inbound phone calls.
Contact details are not known, and the visitors are not yet prospects. Marketing is primarily responsible for engaging visitors. Web and marketing automation tools collect information about behavior while on site. Marketing provides content to encourage visitors to share information. Once information is shared (name, email), the visitor becomes a prospect.
Read MoreThe second stage of the Sales Process is the Prospect Phase. During this phase, basic contact details are known, but neither marketing nor sales have yet qualified the prospect. Many sales processes and CRM applications categorizes prospects in the by setting the Temperature field in the CRM to “Cold”.
Understanding the readiness of a buyer is important. Within a CRM, the Temperature field definition is a critical field for Sales Executives and Managers to keep current at all times. It is the key indication of the depth of engagement with a prospect prior to the quoting process. The Marketing team and our marketing automation email engine use this field heavily when deciding which content to send which prospect, based on the current level of engagement with Sales. The Temperature of a prospect has a one-to-one relationship with the early phases of the sales process. The following definitions should be strictly followed and updated in real-time to the extent possible.
Prospect Temperatures / CRM
- Cold = Prospect – Basic contact details for the prospect are known, but neither marketing nor sales have yet qualified the prospect.
- Cool = Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – The prospect is exhibiting conclusive behavior that indicates both interest and intent to make a purchase, but are not yet Budget, Authority, Needs and Timeline (BANT) qualified by Sales. MQL qualification is usually done by Marketing, but could include a prospect that has phoned in or responded very well to a call/email from Sales.
- Warm = Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – The prospect is BANT qualified. That is, the Sales Executive has conclusively verified that the prospect 1) has Budget/resources to spend, 2) has the Authority to make a decision, 3) has a Need or pain that is compelling enough to require a purchase, and 4) has a defined Timeline that dictates when a bus must be procured and in service.
- Hot = Discovery of Needs/Requirements – The prospect is continually and ACTIVELY engaged with Sales Executive to determine the complete set of vehicle requirements. Sales Executive verifies with the prospect that the gathered requirements are 100% complete and accurate.
When a prospect is identified by Marketing or Sales, the prospect is typically into the Marketing Automation tool or CRM platform. Marketing may create relevant content and follow-up based on the Prospect’s industry segment, geography, purchase history, etc. to nurture that Prospect to increase both his/her interest and intent to purchase.
During this phase, the Marketing team leverages its martech platforms and tools to send content to the prospects in an effort to increase their engagement with web assets or content marketing to better understand the prospect’s buying intent.
The Marketing Automation tool may record the Prospect’s online activities and score these activities.
For example, Prospects score one point for web page views, 5 points for watching a video, and 70 points for filling out a form.
Once the Prospect achieves a sufficient score of 70 points, the Prospect is considered a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), and the lead is passed to a Sales Executive for further qualification.
Prospect characteristics are an important consideration.
Understanding their perspective and motivations will be valuable to achieve a mutually beneficial relationship. A narrative may form about the prospect such as, “I’ve never owned this product before. I don’t have a clue about what to buy. I need lots of guidance. I don’t want to make a mistake.”
“I own many of these products. Don’t waste my time with salesmanship or excuses. Don’t tell me how great your products are. I’m shopping on price alone.”
Or, the narrative may be something like: “I own many of these products. Don’t waste my time with salesmanship or excuses. Don’t tell me how great your products are. I’m shopping on price alone.”
Prospect Motivations
Sales Executives appreciate that different prospects are driven by different motivations.
Understanding the different motivations behind a potential purchase helps Sales Executives ask better, open-ended questions when engaging, qualifying, selling, and servicing our customers.
- Profit Motive: The customer is making an investment in capital equipment that will be used to generate profits. Profit motive customers may be willing to pay more if they perceive greater value in premium priced products, features, or the supplier.
- Business Necessity: The product is seen as a necessary business expense to running their business. Trust and performance is important to a manager or owner of such an operation. He/she has to know that the supplier will be responsive after the sale, and will not embarrass him in a manner that could cost him his credibility or his job. Aftermarket support is critical to the success of maintaining such accounts.
- Value Added: Customers making an investment or incurring additional expense for the purpose of adding value to their operation to attract customers or patrons. The sales representative must be knowledgeable enough to give the customer comfort that his best interests are being considered throughout the process. The customer has to perceive that the salesperson not only knows the products that he is offering but that he also understands the customer’s need better than the customer does himself. These customers, if smart, will reject a salesperson who just wants to sell a product without regard for solving a problem.
- Infrastructure: Providing a service that’s part of company or public infrastructure. Typically the most experienced purchaser, but not always as good at it as he/she may think. Relationship and trust still play a surprisingly significant role in the spec writing and procurement process. Product and features, or certain technical aspects of both, play a much greater role. Very important not to have salespeople who act like they know more than they do because they’ll lose credibility very quickly. The salesperson must be familiar with the concept of, “I don’t know but I’ll find out.”
Statistics show a very high correlation between how quickly a Sales Executive engages a prospect after he/she engages a website and the likelihood of developing an engagement and selling a product.
In a study of 4,000 companies, statistics actually show that if a prospect is called within 5 minutes, there is a 95% chance that the prospect will answer their phone and engage in meaningful dialogue.
After 30 minutes, the probability drops to 44%. The average response time for Salespeople to engage prospects is 48 hours. Imagine what the probability of and engagement is after 48 hours.
With this in mind, Sales Executives in a well defined sales process are expected engage the Prospect in qualification activities as soon as possible after receiving the MQL, such as no later than 8 hours after receipt.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) Phase is when a prospect has achieved SQL status, it means that the prospect is 100% BANT qualified.
During Sales Pipeline reviews, for example, Sales Managers will investigate SQL accounts to insure that the customer has verified all four BANT criteria.
If any of the four criteria are no longer true, the prospect regresses to the MQL phase (by adjusting the prospect’s Temperature field to “Cool”).
Discovery of Needs / Requirements Phase
At this stage of the selling process, the prospect 1) has been BANT qualified by sales, meaning they have Budget/sufficient credit, they have the Authority to make a purchase decision, they have a pain/Need/impending event, a Timeline exists, and 2) the prospect and Sales Executive is fully engaged in the discovery of the prospect’s needs and requirements for purchasing and bus.
Sales representatives may put prospects in the Discover of Needs/Requirements phase by setting the Temperature field in the CRM to “Hot”. This hot temperature and this phase is for only those clients that are consistently and fully engaged in the buying process.
Many Sales Executives ask if both an SQL phase and a Discovery phase is needed in a sales process. Often, you are able to BANT qualify a prospect and begin the Discovery phase only to have the prospect go “radio silent” for a period of weeks.
Whenever a prospect stops returning phone calls, emails, and stops communicating for a period of about 2 weeks, they may be moved back to the SQL phase by changing the Temperature in Infinity from “Hot” back to “Warm”.
The Sales Executive begins discovery to determine the prospect’s detailed needs and requirements.
The goal is to create an exhaustive list (mental or written) of what the customer needs to be successful, and validate with the prospect that we have captured 100% of the requirements.
Doing so will insure that a competitor doesn’t win the deal (just because the time wasn’t made to fully understand the customer’s needs and miss a key decision-making factor).
Design, Propose, Negotiate Phase
The Sales Executive is now ready to design a product from inventory or a tailored service/solution that meets or exceeds the prospect’s requirements.
When quoting and during negotiating phase some of the relevant information should include:
· Original Quote date (new)
· Signing Date
· Delivery Date
Once deal is signed, this information should be included:
· Original Customer Promise Date (new)
· Expected Delivery Date (update with the help of Sales Coordinators)
· Delivery Date (update)
· Signing Date (update)
Until unit is delivered to customer
· Date received in inventory (monitor)
· Expected Delivery Date (update with help of Sales Coordinators)
· Delivery Date (update)
Sold / Customer Phase
After the Customer has signed the Purchase Agreement, given a deposit or a binding Purchase Order (PO), the deal is now consider to be in the Sold/Customer phase of the Sales Process.
Sales Process Design Experts
Rick NicholsManaging Partner, Revenue Growth
