What Is a Sales Process? A Deceptively Simple Question That Divides Good Sales Teams from Great Sales Teams

If you ask ten sales professionals “what is a sales process?” you will get ten different answers. Some will say that it’s the stages you go through to move buyers through the sales pipeline. Others will tell you it’s the methodology you use to sell. Many will include “prospect to close” but leave account growth out of it.

In complex sales, a sales process defines the milestones and actions required for salespeople and potential buyers to move from the current state to a desired future state. It guides your salespeople to execute your Way of Selling, the emergent property of which is buyers thinking, “Wow, I want to buy from this company.” A well-designed sales process improves sales success, enables the replication of best practices across the sales organization, enhances sales professionals’ skills, and minimizes risks for both buyer and seller.

What a Sales Process Is Not

A sales process is not, first and foremost, a dropdown box in your CRM. It’s not a series of stages from “prospecting” to “closed.” It’s not a conversational style or a series of questions to ask a prospect. And it shouldn’t be something that individual salespeople figure out on their own.

A true sales process is documented, visualized, reinforced, and executed by every professional on the sales team. It is dynamic, flexible, yet consistent. In a broad sense, a sales process consists of three main components: Stages, milestones, steps, and key activities. Each part of the process should be accompanied by dynamic checklists and training content that help salespeople ensure they are not skipping steps or missing opportunities, and that provide clear criteria for when a buyer moves from one stage to another.

The Components of a Sales Process

Every sales process should contain stages, milestones to complete within each stage, and the steps and actions salespeople take to reach those milestones.

• Sales Process Stages
  In a complex B2B sale, process stages often follow some version of prospecting, engagement and discovery, solution building, consensus and commitment, and delivery. At Membrain, we include account growth as part of the sales process, but as a  separate workflow from prospecting and opportunity management. Every company will have its own version based on its industry, Way of Selling, and how they think about their sales process.
  
  

• Sales Process Milestones
  

  Within each sales process stage are milestones that indicate progress through that stage. For instance, within prospecting, a milestone might include a scheduled call and pre-qualification. Engagement and discovery might include milestones like identifying and contacting relevant stakeholders, understanding their current struggles, and identifying the project goals of each stakeholder. 

  In a healthy sales process, salespeople must complete each milestone successfully before moving on to the next stage.
  
  

• Sales Process Steps
  In order to achieve each milestone, salespeople must engage in specific process steps and activities. For instance, in order to identify and contact relevant stakeholders, they must ask the initial contact person the right discovery questions, book calls with those stakeholders, and ask them the right discovery questions as well. In a healthy sales process, the steps and actions a salesperson takes will be dynamic according to the context of the specific sale, but reinforced and repeatable from one sale to the next.

Sales Process Execution

In order to execute sales process consistently across all sales team members, the sales organization must have a technology platform that supports execution. It should enable salespeople to see each new step within their daily workflow, identify priority actions, and track where they are in the process as they go.  It also needs to embed training content that describes how each milestone and action is best achieved/performed. Membrain was built from day one to be the flexible, dynamic tool your team needs to guide them through their daily workflow, ensure compliance with the sales process, and capture new best practices as they emerge, to repeat throughout the organization.

How to Build an Effective Sales Process

The best sales processes are those that center the buyer’s experience and help salespeople to create the buying experience that leads to “Wow, I want to buy from this company.” They focus on helping the salesperson facilitate the buying team to develop a shared mental model of the solution, and then catalyze them to make the decision to move forward.

To build an effective sales process, you must first understand your customer, why they buy, how they buy, and what success will look like to them. Then you can map the stages, milestones, and steps of your sales process to their needs to ensure a smooth, consistent, effective experience for them that leads to a positive outcome for everyone.

Once you have a sales process in place, reinforce it by placing it into the salespeople’s workflow, using a platform like Membrain. Then, within the process, you can embed training, coaching, and enablement content to help them improve their skills and support the buyer at every point in the process.

Additionally, your platform should enable you to collect data, analyze results, and identify best practices as they emerge, then propagate those practices across the rest of the sales team. AI tools can be used to analyze, automate, and speed up parts of the process in order to free salespeople to focus on thinking and helping the customer.

For more detailed help in building your sales process and embedding it into the sales team’s workflow, download the Sales Leader’s Guide to Effective Sales Process Execution.

When your team is equipped and supported in executing an effective sales process, your Way of Selling becomes a competitive advantage. Because how you sell… is why you win.