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    The 3 Most Important Questions about Sales Process

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    Sales Process is a topic that I have chosen to write about around 25 times over the past 10 years. Lately, we are finally beginning to see some improvements being made in this area.

    For example, back in the early 90's, when Objective Management Group (OMG) first began measuring the existence of sales process, only 9% of all salespeople were following one with any degree of consistency and effectiveness. It was amazing to me that for 20 years, this number failed to change! But recent statistics are showing that 20-25% of companies and their salespeople are finally following and using a sales process. Hooray!

    With sales process finally getting the necessary attention, we should turn our attention to the two related issues that need to be addressed.

    1. Which sales process should you select?

    To help answer the question of which sales process, it's important to understand that there aren't that many to begin with! Names you might recognize as sales processes, like Challenger, SPIN and Sandler, are really methodologies - not processes. For example, this video explains one complete Sales Process - Baseline Selling - and compares it with Challenger, SPIN and Solution Selling.

    It should be clear that you need a complete process and it should be customized for your business, what you sell, who you sell to, and the challenges that you face. If you already have a process, or think you have a process, you can grade it for free using our complimentary sales process grader.

    2. Which CRM should you choose?

    Enterprise-size companies may still believe that they need to choose Salesforce.com because it's promoted as the only platform that will do everything an enterprise-size company needs.

    However, there are lots of choices, and Salesforce.com is probably not the best choice - unless you like spending a ton of money on customization, only to have a clunky interface that salespeople dislike. And if your salespeople don't like it, they won't live in it, and if they don't live in it, the information on that dashboard, which you paid a fortune to customize, will be as useless as a typewriter.

    Sales process, without a CRM application that can fully utilize it, is solving only half of the problem.
    Dave Kurlan

    3. How easily can sales process be integrated into the CRM?

    It's difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to truly integrate sales process into CRM and expect its presence to be useful. However, there is one system where the focus is sales process, the playbook, the pipeline and the dashboard and that is Membrain. Salespeople love it and that means they will live in it, data will be available in real time, and your dashboard will be predictive! It doesn't need a whole lot of customization out of the box, and what customization it does require, won't require an integrator. 

    Some companies really get stuck when it comes to CRM, swayed by the crowd to move to Salesforce.com, but overwhelmed with the work required to roll out an instance of salesforce.com to their sales force.

    Getting back to CRM, I've also written a dozen articles on CRM. This article on scorecards illustrates the power of having a CRM application that can be easily customized and tweaked as you go along and gain more information. Another article discusses the 16 problems with CRM. Finally, this article provides an example of how you can use the information on a CRM dashboard to improve revenue.

    Sales process, without a CRM application that can fully utilize it, is solving only half of the problem. CRM, without a good sales process, yields the same net outcome. And when both the process and the CRM app are not as good as they could be, you're essentially moving at the speed of water evaporating! You're slowly moving backwards!

    I think that if you check out the version of Membrain with Baseline Selling pre-integrated into it, you'll want to have it.

    Article originally published May 9th 2016 on
    Dave Kurlan's Blog
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    Dave Kurlan
    Published May 22, 2016
    By Dave Kurlan

    Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, successful entrepreneur, and sales development industry pioneer. The founder and CEO of the Objective Management Group, the leading developer of sales assessment tools, headquartered in Westboro, Massachusetts. He is also the CEO of Kurlan & Associates, a leading salesforce development firm. He has 3 decades of experience in all facets of sales development, including consulting, training, coaching, selection, strategy, systems, processes, and metrics.

    Dave is also the creator of the Membrain Baseline Selling Edition, a pre-configured Membrain with Baseline Selling built-in, including Dave's sales enablement content. This Edition will help your salespeople to make your way of selling into a competitive advantage.

    Find out more about Dave Kurlan on LinkedIn