The Most Overlooked Lever For Improving Sales Growth

When we talk about sales improvement, we often focus on one of these big three: Payroll and compensation, training and enablement, and the tech stack. But in many cases, there is a bigger drain–and a bigger opportunity– that most companies aren’t even using: Workflows.

When your sales team comes in to work each day, how confident are you that they immediately begin working on the highest priority, biggest impact tasks? Most sales leaders have no idea. They know whether the team is meeting quota, whether they’re fulfilling the right number of daily activities, and whether they are up to date on product knowledge and training.

But they don’t always have detailed insight into how much of the salesperson’s time is wasted on non-revenue or low-impact activities. How much of it is focused on high-impact activities? How much time is wasted in task-switching and deciding what to do next? How often are common mistakes repeated, costing the company millions? This severely limits a team’s ability to grow.

Improving workflows is one of the most underrated, high impact changes you can make inside a sales organization.

Effective, tech-supported workflows fix all of this. Salespeople and their managers and colleagues should be able to log in each morning and see exactly what needs to happen in each of the workflows they are responsible for, whether it’s prospecting, pipeline management, account growth, or the behind the scenes work that makes the rest of it go.

Thus, improving workflows is one of the most underrated, high impact changes you can make inside a sales organization. So if you want to improve your sales this year, here are the main workflows your salespeople need:

1. Prospecting
2. Opportunity & Pipeline Management
3. Account Growth

And here are the workflows the rest of the team needs:

• Analysis and Optimization
• Professional Development
• Customer Success
• And one more… read on…

The Three Primary Salesperson Workflows

Most sales teams are responsible for three key activity types: Prospecting, opportunity & pipeline management, and account growth. These each require a very different mindset and approach, and sometimes are divided among different team members. You need flexible workflows for each one that help team members focus on their work, and hand off responsibilities cleanly between workflows. Here’s what each of the three workflows needs to support.'

The Prospecting Workflow

Prospecting is a high-volume activity, relative to other workflows. It tends to involve more interactions with more contacts at a faster pace than later parts of the sales process. These activities may include cold calls, emails, LinkedIn engagement, booking meetings, or any number of other activities designed to gain access to potential clients.

For this reason, the prospecting workflow should support efficiency. In complex sales, this efficiency should be accompanied by attention to quality interaction and effective engagement at scale. Complex sales teams cannot afford to alienate their relatively smaller client pool, so their prospecting workflow must provide efficient means to provide high-quality interactions while also giving the salesperson guidance and support to get each prospect to the next stage.

The prospecting workflow should also reinforce clear criteria for when, how, and whether a prospect moves out of the prospecting workflow and into the active pipeline workflow. This keeps the pipeline clean and provides for clearer insight and forecasting later in the process.

The Active Pipeline Workflow

When a prospect moves into the active pipeline, the salesperson’s approach must shift and slow into the work of discovery, engagement, and developing a shared mental model of the problem and solution. Sales professionals engaged in complex sales will spend the majority of their time in this workflow, so it should provide them with substantial guidance, tools, and checklists to help them move the most important projects forward.

This workflow should make it easy for salespeople and their managers to see where each opportunity is in the process, how they are moving through it, that relevant stakeholders have been engaged, what needs to happen next, and whether there are any problem areas to address. This workflow should also make it easy for salespeople to execute on the process by providing next steps, access to training content and guidance, as well as intelligently offering up materials to send to the prospect.

The Account Growth Workflow

Once a project is complete and a new customer has been onboarded, the workflow changes once again into the account management or (as we call it at Membrain) the account growth workflow. Now, instead of steady progress through steps, milestones, and stages, sales professionals responsible for the account begin the steady work of maintaining relationships, prioritizing attention, and looking for opportunities to grow with the customer.

This calls for tools designed to surface insights about which customers are ready for growth, how they are using our products, and where to focus attention for the greatest gains.

Three Sales Support and Improvement Workflows

Your sales team forms the frontline of your sales system, but in order to reach its potential, it requires behind the scenes support including continual improvement to your Way of Selling through analysis and optimization, and ongoing improvement on your team through professional development (including training, management, and coaching). These aspects of your sales system each need their own workflow as well.

Analysis and Optimization

Highly successful sales teams don’t just get good and stay there. They continually adapt, improve, and optimize their unique Way of Selling. This aspect of sales requires good data, insightful analysis, and the ability to implement and scale process changes quickly.

Assuming you begin with good, clean data (which is possible when your other workflows are solid), good AI tools can help surface insights. Additionally, you need a robust set of tools that help you perform effective win/loss analysis, unearth hidden factors impacting your effectiveness, and understand which of your sales team members need support and in what ways.

People Development

Just as the most successful sales teams continually improve their processes and capabilities, so also the most successful sales professionals remain committed to building their skills, abilities, and overall effectiveness. Sales managers and coaches are a critical multiplier in helping each individual to improve, and they need the right workflow for this as well.

This workflow should help managers easily see who needs development, what they need, and how to engage with them to build effectiveness across the team and maximize the employee’s potential.

Customer Success

Finally, a successful client engagement does not end when you sign a contract. Your ongoing success depends, in part, on the customer’s. Your customer success team needs a workflow for managing onboarding, helping the customer to achieve their goals, and ensuring that your solution continues to serve their needs.

And One More… Workflows Unique to Your Organization

Every sales team is different and has different needs. And every sales team’s effectiveness is impacted by workflows outside of sales. To best support sales, you need the ability to build flexible, dynamic workflows that meet the needs of individual salespeople, sales managers and coaches, sales executives, customer success employees, and others whose performance impacts your company’s bottom line.

Software like Membrain’s Flows makes it possible to build custom workflows for any aspect of your business, from human resources to customer fulfillment and accounting.

Software That Makes It All Possible

When I set out to build the world’s best software platform for complex sales, I didn’t want to stop at a single tool. I wanted to provide the most effective workflows possible, to support every aspect of a sales team’s success.

That’s why Membrain offers separate, customizable workflows for all the key aspects of your sales system, with flexible pricing that lets you pay only for what each team member needs.

With the new Insight Engine, we've infused AI, external data sources, and systems thinking to automate work that can be automated and help organize information in ways that help salespeople and leaders connect the dots more easily in order to maximize both efficiency and effectiveness.  

Investing in solid infrastructure to support employee workflows is one of the best performance investments a company can make. With effective workflows in place, sales professionals and other members of your team can focus their efforts where they’re most needed. This, in turn, means you can get the most out of the rest of your investments, whether it’s AI technology, sales training, product development, or operations.

I wonder–if you were to rate your company’s maturity on the scale of workflows, where would you be? How is your technology supporting or hindering those workflows?