Map out your sales process - from prospect to customer

According to Objective Management Group’s statistics from evaluating more than 850,000 salespeople in 10,000 companies, 91 per cent of salespeople still don’t have, or don’t follow a formal, customised sales process.

And the fact is, if there is no process in place, then there is a very high chance that your team are not working as effectively and efficiently as they could be – which of course, in turn, affects profitability and growth for your business.

Not convinced?

Here are eight reasons why mapping your sales process is a must:

1. Creates visibility around where your leads come from and how do they turn into customers
2. Allows you to qualify or disqualify opportunities early in the process
3. Enables accurate predictive forecasting
4. Means the team can sing off the same song sheet
5. Provides Sales Managers the ability to coach and hold salespeople accountable on one process - there are not 101 best ways to make a sale
6. Your team can make their own discoveries around where they fall short
7. Road blocks are easily identifiable
8. Helps scale your business, and to ramp up new salespeople

So if you don’t have a sales process, or you haven’t reviewed it in a long time, you must revisit it and spend time documenting the way you want the sales team to prospect and nurture leads through the sales funnel. Here’s a few insights into how world-renowned sales leader Dave Kurlan works on creating sales processes with his clients:

1. First, I collect all of their steps, milestones and to-do’s
2. Next, we divide the process into four-to-six stages and place each of their existing steps, milestones and to-do’s into the most appropriate stage. Stages can be as simple as: suspect, prospect, qualified opportunity and closable opportunity
3. Then, we identify all of the steps and milestones that are missing from their process. When we get to this point, most clients are missing anywhere from 6 to 15 important milestones
4. Next, we need to optimise by identifying the proper sequence
5. Then we identify ideal time lines for each stage of the process
6. We weight the most crucial milestones in order to calculate the likelihood of closing - the accuracy of your sales forecasts is in direct proportion to nailing the proper weighting
7. Then we enter the sales process, timelines, weights and underlying rules into Membrain.

Then of course there’s another process required when a new customer comes on board – is there an opportunity to up-sell, and if so, how is that quantified – and by who? Most sales leaders know that selling to existing clients offers a very profitable opportunity to businesses – but many don’t have any sort of plan around how to proactively do this. So why not beat your competitors to the punch?