The question I am continually faced with when working with sales teams is how is it possible to make a sales process work, and not increase the burden of administrative tasks on to an already heavy workload of the sales person. My advice is to look at three key points.
- How many sales people are using it as a road map to decide on their activities to get from one point to another in the sales process? This will determine whether this is an administrative burden, or add value to the activities of the sales person.
- Is anything being learnt in monitoring sales progress for each opportunity, i.e. patterns emerging for the different outcomes for different individuals (won lost, abandoned), segmentation by market, product, channel, territory, etc.? This will establish what the won, lost, and abandoned opportunity sales process templates look like so that they can be used to overlay the situation in a current opportunity to identify at any time what could be the possible outcome then decide on activities to be carried out.
- Is the sales process being continually reviewed? By checking the results from point 2 against the sales management’s expectations of what the sales process of a won, lost, abandoned opportunity would look like and refining it, the better will be the results, e.g. shorter sales cycle, focusing on high probability opportunities and abandoning low probability opportunities early on in the sales process, anticipating possible issues, producing accurate and credible sales forecasts that can be trusted by senior management.
There must be commitment to all three points otherwise it will not work.
Now we know what we are doing, we need to gauge how we are performing compared to other businesses in the same industry. We have a perception, but what is the reality?
We need to gather intelligence, and it is not as hard as you think. Start gathering the information from each of your sales team about each of the opportunities that they are dealing with.
- Who are the main competitors?
- What has the client indicated are our strengths and weaknesses compared to other organisations?
- Why did we win or lose an opportunity, e.g. price, product fit, market presence, company profile, etc.?
What we are looking for is to establish if there any trends in our sales outcomes, so keep the questions simple and distinct. Now we have established trends that have occurred in managing, winning, or losing an opportunity, we can relate the information back to our sales process and establish what needs to be refined.
Next, how do you deal with the amount of data that is being collected whilst using the sales process into meaningful information? In today’s fast moving sales environment we have to be quick and sharp. So far we have only taken into consideration people and process. To complete the picture we need to include technology. Technology is a vital part in helping us manage and improve the sales process so that we can achieve our sales objectives.
CRM systems are being used in the area of sales process, but since many are contact centric it means that the sales process might get distorted so that it fits within the system setup. Any system that we intend to use has to be flexible so that the sales process can be implemented in the same way that it is being used. At each step of the sales process we should be able to place qualification criteria with the appropriate scoring, and be able to define what information needs to be collected to verify our position within the sales process. We should have the ability to set up rules to inform us of forthcoming critical events, and also warn us of possible obstacles towards closing the sale. All this needs to be done in one integrated system.
No one said it was easy, but it is very rewarding with results showing an increase in handling qualified opportunities up by 50%, and the win rate increasing by 30%. Lastly, the users view the system as invaluable in carrying out their sales activities.