Creating a Prospecting Process

Before a prospective client is ready to enter your sales pipeline, it needs to be properly qualified. If not, there is a risk that your pipeline gets filled with opportunities unlikely to close, chewing up both valuable time and resources. Here to help you with this is Membrain's powerful Prospecting features.

You can set up different processes for different types of leads and prospects, with defined qualification criteria that need to be confirmed before the lead becomes a sales project. You can use these processes to segment between different lead sources (inbound, network events, outbound activities, social selling), different customer segments (product categories, new/existing business, industries) or something else completely.

Getting Started

This article takes you through creating a Prospecting Process with instructions for each step of the way. To simplify things, we suggest you break it down into 5 areas:

1. Creating a Prospecting Process - Instructions on how to create a new Process
2. Process Stage and Step Creation - Guide your salespeople with a step-by-step Process
3. Adding Tools and Details to Steps - These are tools to help carry out each step
4. Adding Qualifiers, Contacts, and Details - Identify and record additional information
5. Configuring the Process - Add Rules and Automated Events

Creating a Prospecting Process

Membrain Administrators can import or create new Prospecting Processes from the System Setup area.
When creating a new Process, you will get three options:

• Start from our Template Process - To get inspiration and adjust it to be better suit your desired layout.
• Copy an Existing Process - Useful option when rebuilding a Process without having to do live changes on the active Process.
• Start from a Blank Process - Set up the basics and build the foundation of your Process to reflect your organization's focus.

Step-by-step guide

1. To your left hand, on the vertical menu bar, click on the cog wheel icon for System Setup
2. In the Prospecting Processes area, click on "New Process"
3. Select if you want to Start from our Template Process, Copy an Existing Process or Start from a Blank Process.
   

Process Name & Description

Begin by choosing a name for your Process, add a Process Description and select which user should be allowed to edit it.

From the color picker icon to the right hand of the Process Name assign a color to your process, this will be shown in dashboards when choosing to segment by process.

Finally select which user is appointed to manage the process, this information will be displayed to your users so they know who to refer to.

The information you have provided is then previewed when hovering over the Process name inside each individual Prospect that uses this process.

Process Stage and Step Creation

Begin by setting up the basics of your Process. Map out each step of your Process and break it down into stages, if necessary. Once you have a solid foundation that reflects your Process focus, you can then add more complex tools later on.

Adding Steps

Add steps and stages to a Prospecting Process to help salespeople follow a workflow built specifically for a certain type of Prospect.

1. Click on the add step button
   
2. Give the new step a name, for example, "Research" or "1st phone call"
3. Continue adding steps to outline your Process with the individual tasks you want the sales team to follow as they're working with a prospect.
   
4. Add additional steps between existing ones easily by hovering between two steps and clicking on the blue icon
5. Rearrange the order of the steps themselves by hovering over the step you want to move until you see theicon just above, and dragging and dropping it to the left or right. If you prefer, you may also click on the step itself, press the Move button and choose where you want it to be moved to.
   

Wait Steps

Wait steps are unique to the Prospecting Process, and allow you to add a cadence to your Process. Adding a delay between steps can help your salespeople get the timing right, guiding them on when they should hold off while ensuring that they keep the momentum up and don't let a Prospect go too long without the next activity being carried out.

1. Click into the step you want to wait before you get to it.
2. Set the Wait Time in business days, days, hours or minutes.
3. Click Save.
   
   
   
   Note: When a Wait Step is set in business days and it becomes the active step, Membrain converts those Business Days into Calendar Days and Hours and displays the remaining time.

Milestone Steps

Milestone steps are a great way to add a natural flow to your Process. If you get to a specified milestone earlier than expected, you can skip through the Process and save yourself some time.

Learn more about Milestone Steps - how they can help you work smarter with your prospect lists, and how to set them up.

Adding Stages

A Prospecting Process can work perfectly well with just one Stage, but if you want to break it up into 2 or more Stages, that works too. Stages can be used for lots of different scenarios, for example, to help identify when a Prospect has passed an important milestone and should perhaps be managed differently. 

To add a Stage to your Process:

1. Click Add Stage, which is always found at the end of the Process editor.
   
2. Name your Stage, add a description for your team about what the objective of this stage is, and if you have any relevant sales enablement material to upload or choose from within the Content Hub, add it from the Sales Content section to the right hand side.
   

Adding Tools and details to Steps

Once you're happy with the steps you've added to your Process, you can add lots of functionality to these steps, such as email templates, call steps, or even playbooks or scorecards. Learn how to do this in this separate article which covers how to Add tools and details to Steps.

Adding Qualifiers, Stakeholders, and Details

Qualifiers

Qualifiers are a great way to filter out the prospects that might not be worth pursuing and to pinpoint the ones that have potential, based on certain criteria (eg. industry type, budget, pain points, etc). Once you have determined what your ideal customer should look like, you can build your qualifying questions and add them to the Prospecting Process, to be answered during the course of the prospect life cycle. These Qualifiers then guide your team on whether to Qualify or Disqualify the prospect, based on the answers to those questions.

You can read lots about Qualifiers in Sales Projects and Account Growth here, but here's a quick step by step guide to get started with Qualifiers for Prospecting.

1. From the Process editor, go the Qualifiers section to the right-hand side, and click Add Qualifier
   
    
2. Choose a custom field to base this question on. A custom field is a list in Membrain that contains information about a certain subject.
   For example: if you wish to target prospects from a certain industry, you can select certain industries that would qualify this prospect and other industries that would disqualify it. Or if you want to add a new custom field and record new information to use as a qualifier, click on the New Custom field link at the top of the window.
3. Next, determine the rules you want to apply to this qualifier. What's a positive choice, and what's potentially concerning. A simple example would be as follows.
   For the Qualified If section: In the All Box, you see all the options available. Move the ones you wish to be a positive option across to the Selected Box
   Leave Disqualified If section blank.
4. Use the Qualified If or Disqualified If options to get creative and really break down exactly how you would like this qualifier to work, with combinations of any selected, any 2 of selected, etc.
   
   
5. Set the importance of this Qualifier. Select if you want this Qualifier to show in the Process as Blue, Yellow or Red, depending on the seriousness of this Qualifier.

Stakeholders

The Stakeholders in your Prospecting Process are the important Contacts you're working with, who have been assigned a Role like Decision Maker, Validator, etc. Adding Stakeholders and their Roles is done from the contacts area of the Prospecting Process, to the right.

By defining Stakeholders you want to be identified while working through the Prospecting Process, you can guide your salespeople to ensure they identify the important people for the Prospect you're working with, every time.

1. From the Process editor, navigate to the right-hand side, and under Company and Contacts, click Add Stakeholder
   
   
2. Select the Role for this Stakeholder, and choose if its an External or Internal Stakeholder. Learn more about adding Roles and defining Stakeholders.
   
   

Details

Using the Details section in the Prospecting Process is a great way to record important information about a prospect as you work. Information such as Urgency, Budget, Pain Points, etc can help you to get a full picture of where the potential customer is in terms of suitability or readiness to move forward.

Information captured here is not necessarily a show stopper in terms of if they will enter your pipeline as a sales project or not, that's what Qualifiers do. But this information is still very important and should be captured nonetheless.

Details are created as Custom Fields in the Prospecting Process and found on the right-hand side of the Process editor. Learn more about Custom Fields here.

Configuring the Process

Adding Events

Membrain has the capability to respond to events with automated actions and greatly simplify the workflow for both sales management and the sales team. These events can be used to notify somebody that they have been assigned a new lead through email or to create a task for somebody to follow up within a certain time frame or similar.

To learn more about events, read the article about Automated Events.

Adding Rules

As with Sales Projects and Account Growth Projects, you can add rules to your Prospecting Process. These rules will help salespeople prioritize where they should spend their time, and which prospects to engage with.

Rules can be set on things such as Time to First Activity, useful for inbound or automatically generated leads, or Number of Days Since a Step was Last Completed. For more information, read the article about Rules in Membrain.

Adding Disqualify Reasons

Disqualify reasons are a listing of all the reasons why you might disqualify a prospect and a great way to record and analyze this data in the future. As disqualify reasons can be used across multiple Processes, they are not set up in the individual setup for each Process, but rather added at the Admin level.

To learn more about how to create Disqualify Reasons, read this article here Disqualify Reasons

Publishing the Process

Once you're happy with your new Prospecting Process, click on the Publish button to the right. You can update and improve your Process at any time by going back into the Process editor, making change and publishing again.