Four Traps Your Sales Process Must Avoid

If you’ve been following me for long, you know I talk a lot about the importance of sales process. So, you may be surprised to hear me say that sometimes the sales process is the very thing that kills the sales organization.

Consider this scenario: Your best salespeople are ignoring your process, and you’re letting them get away with it because they’re delivering results. Your worst salespeople may input their data (pipeline, leads, etc.) to bolster perceived performance so they won’t get fired, but this activity is not actually helping them to get better. Your average salespeople may be lukewarm on the process, and it’s hard to see how or even whether they’re fully utilizing it. If you asked any of them to describe the process, they’d give you a vague answer, and no one answer would match anyone else’s.

Or this scenario: Your sales organization used to be among the top performers in your industry, and your sales process was widely admired. Recently, performance has slipped and you’re struggling to understand why. Managers may have become more aggressive in enforcing sales process, with little or no results.

If either of these situations sounds familiar, it’s quite possible that the very sales process that was supposed to bolster your organization is what’s killing it. Here are four ways that can happen.

1. Your sales process is (only) designed to hold salespeople accountable

   Accountability is great. Accountability helps us learn and grow. But a sales process built around accountability is the number one cause of salesperson disengagement, and therefore sales performance failure.
   
   David Licari, in a conversation on LinkedIn, put it this way: “Salespeople, by their very nature, often don’t like to be told to do something.” And they hate it when we force them to prove that they haven’t done things. This goes for pretty much all human bings, I'd say.
   
   
   https://www.linkedin.com/groups/1830832/1830832-6107516093247606787
   
   Yet most CRMs and the accompanying sales processes focus almost exclusively on making sure that salespeople are performing a certain number of activities, rather than on learning, growing, and making progress with prospects and customers. At best, this approach wastes the salesperson’s time, and at worst it causes active disengagement that can lead to poor performance. It also gives managers little to no useful intelligence into what is happening.
   
   Avoiding the accountability trap: Design a process that focuses on learning, growth, and progress with each prospect and deal, rather than on making sure salespeople are logging a high volume of activities. Then, ensure that salespeople understand the “why” behind the sales process. Include accountability, but don’t make it the focus of the process itself.

2. Your sales process is antiquated

   To perform optimally, your sales process must be dynamic and continuously evolving.

   George Brontén
   You may not be teaching your salespeople to judge buyers based on the size of their foreheads (yes, that was actually a thing once upon a time), but that doesn’t mean your sales process isn’t out of date.
   
   Many current sales processes, for instance, still assume that the buyer needs the salesperson to provide information. The fact is that buyers now have all the information they want and more, thanks to the proliferation of the Internet and content marketing. Failing to take this into account causes sales to flounder as buyers go where the salespeople understand their buying process.
   
   Further, the content sellers and marketers use to support the buying process is often out of date. Many organizations still use materials that are heavily focused on features, functionality, and benefits, rather than on answering questions the buyers have.
   
   The market moves so fast now, that if your sales process and supporting materials haven’t been updated in the past year, they’re out of date. At best, an out-of-date process is less effective than it could be. At worst, it may damage your company’s relationship with prospects and erode your sales success.
   
   Avoiding the antiquation trap: Match the sales process to how buyers need to buy what you offer, and update it as the market changes. Additionally, apply the principles under #3 below.

3. You’re not checking “under the hood” frequently enough

   Even the latest “out of the box” sales process won’t perform optimally until it’s been customized for the organization using it. And because the market changes so fast, optimization of the process must be ongoing in order to stay ahead of buyers. Yet many organizations don’t evaluate their process even once a year, if at all.
   
   The result of this failure is a sales department that is in a constant state of gradual decay, with salespeople becoming less and less effective over time as the old process ages. At best, you fall behind the competition that’s staying on top of their process, and at worst your organization institutes and reinforces sales behaviors that are counterproductive.
   
   Avoiding the out-of-the-box trap: To perform optimally, even a custom process must be dynamic and continuously evolving. Ask salespeople what’s working (and what’s not), and use tools like Membrain to enable effective win/loss analysis, and apply insights back into the sales process and qualification process.

4. Your salespeople don’t have the tools they need to meet expectations

   A once-and-done approach to sales training is the culprit of this failure. Organizations may invest in a process and/or methodology, send their people to the training, and then expect the salespeople to take the bull by the horn and apply everything they’ve learned over the long haul.
   
   Research, experience, and brain science all tell us this isn’t going to happen. At best, this approach may give a few high-achieving individuals some tools to apply, and they may grow as salespeople while the rest of the department lapses back into old habits. At worst, failing to provide tools can encourage damaging behaviors and discourage even high achievers from applying their learning.
   
   Avoiding the once-and-done trap: Provide your sales team with technologies that provide continuous reinforcement and learning opportunities, and that give managers insights that enable effective coaching.

Sales process can be an organization’s greatest asset in achieving high performance, when it’s done right. But, as Jean-Yves Piton said on LinkedIn, “You never go on the battlefront without a game plan, and you first need to have the buy-in of your soldiers. If they don’t believe in what you are trying to accomplish, the mission will fail.”

To learn more about building a process that your “soldiers” will buy into and that will equip them to win the “battle,” check out this guide, and download the excel template to start mapping out your own sales process: