Understanding The Sales Process
Getting your sales targets every month, quarter, or even annually is often what sales leaders are looking forward to. And the successful salespersons have achieved targets.
Sales professionals know their sales process a whole lot better than many of their peers. The sales process includes making appointments with customers; discussing solutions; clarifying the challenges customers might have; presenting solutions and closing the sale. By having a solid understanding of your sales process you become better at it.
When I first became a professional salesperson I was taught the sales process as a series of steps that began with making the call. I always started with making the call no matter who I called. Within six months of making the call, I eventually met with the customer. Do you begin and end your telephone conversations with a customer with the same complete confidence? Do you ask what their current situation is or do you get them talking to?
Closely intermingling with the sales process is the dialogue. How often do the conversations skip right to the product or service you can provide? The dialogue is one of relationship building as well as asking for the order. This necessary part of the sales process should evolve. The dialogue developed through the sales process of taking the action of making the call to asking for the order.
Salespeople understand their prospects and customers better than anyone else. Spending time with them, asking them great questions, and asking for the order. Until your salespeople uncover the real problems their customers have time for selling blind. Ask the critical questions to help you develop a proof of concept leak. Avoid the blind answers for salespeople.
Running projects to produce revenue, even great revenues are predicated on sales activities to allow you to bring in the money all of the time. Selling organizations should include product development, customer interaction, marketing, sales, and many other activities to make a sale happen. A single salesperson cannot perform all the functions of a sales organization. Develop the sales process to leverage each selling professional to their full potential.
Today many small companies cannot afford a full-time sales professional. The sales process is going to entail several different tasks such as prospecting, making customer inquiries, helping your customers with solutions, presenting solutions, and moving the sale to the next stage. It is the combination of a professional team selling system along with your core salespeople that is going to produce the results you seek.
Closing the sale does not stop at the close. Continue to close the sale, adopt a consultative sales approach by continuing to consult and build your relationship as you have done your sales process. Salespeople all of a sudden realize you are being paid to be a friend.
Managing and supervising the sales process before, during, and pressuring the closing of the sale is where a consistent staff that understands a selling process from the start will perform much better than a rigid and strict salesperson with outdated skills
The reason for the above is that as the salesperson keeps repeating effective selling practices to produce sales they will continue to go right. But after they’ve built a relationship and have launched into their closing sequence the sales process breaks down. They begin to make mistakes, are interrupted continuously, and finally give up. Often because the sales managers have just stopped asking them why they are selling the products.
Before continuing to ask why the customer should buy the product, ask yourself why the sale occurred in the first place. Using the strategies in my selling process I would be able to go right to closing the sale and consequently not have to get off the selling path. Or in other words, why did the identified needs exist. And then it was time for me to give up, it would have been much more effective and efficient if I would have continued working towards the closing of the sale.
