Creating a sales process or a sales plan may seem intimidating at first, but it is crucial for the repetitive success of the company.
The sales process is one of the most important things you need to have in place to improve sales. Having an effective sales process will help you improve your sales and grow your business, and as we said, repeat the results.
To have a robust sales process, you need to sit down and think about each sale funnel stage and identify the key touchpoints with the customer. Here is a great article on the stages of a sales process, along with a free template to create a sales process.
So let’s get started with it, first thing first.
What is a sales process?
The sales process is nothing but the steps and interactions the salesperson has with the prospect in order to convert him from being a targeted audience to a customer.
It involves strategic sales planning and methodologies integrated with advanced tools for effectively executing every step involved in the sales funnel.
“Companies that master a formal sales funnel generate 28% more revenue.” - Harvard Business Review.
Are you wondering why you need a sales process still?
Read how Nike transformed its sales with strategic sales process and planning- here.
Now without any delay, let’s get into the steps for creating a sales process.
Steps to create a sales process
Step 1: List the sales stages
First thing first, define the number of steps your prospect will be going through for him to finally become your customer. Without knowing the number of steps or sales stages in the funnel, defining every stage and funnel growth would be difficult.
Step 2: Prospecting
Technically this is the first step of the sales funnel.
Prospects based on the reach-out strategy can be divided into inbound and outbound.
Inbound are those prospects that reach out to your company through your website or over the company’s mail.
Inbound prospecting is what your marketing team and the inbound team do, that is, create attractive and relatable content and share it with the world to attract your prospects. Post your prospects and leave an inquiry. Your inbound team can reach out to them to qualify the prospect based on the product’s buying criteria.
Next comes your outbound prospecting.
Outbound prospecting is mainly cold reach out to the created lists of target prospects based on the prospect qualifying criteria.
You must be thinking about how you can define your targeted audience, so here is the answer.
In this step, even define your targeted audience, i.e.:
- Demographic
- Job title
- Job function
- Country
- Industry, etc.
Step 3: Qualifying the prospect
The next step is actually reaching out to your list of potential customers.
Once you have these details, it’s time to start prospecting and reaching out to your targeted audience through various mediums like:
- Social media
- Call
- Messages, etc.
Hereafter reaching out, you check:
- Prospect’s reason for contacting( for inbound)
- Pain points
- Budget
- Company size
- Company’s accomplishments.
You can also use different tools like email marketing software, power dialer tools, and text messaging CRM to level up your process.
Also, check if the prospect is a decision-maker, especially when it comes to high-end B2B sales.
Step 4: Research the prospect before the demo call
Before you get on a consecutive call to explain your products offerings and how they can help your prospect, research your prospect.
And when we say research, we mean everything, their current processes, number of team members, their clients, etc. This data will help you better understand and prepare for the call and hopefully could be a driving force for closing the deal.
Step 5: Pitching your product
The key to successfully pitching a product is to make it as relevant and customized to each specific lead as possible. It's nothing personal, but there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all in the pitching world. While specific points like core benefits and quantifiable data overlap between pitches, the details should be modified accordingly.
That's why it's so important for reps to keep careful track of everything leads tell them earlier on so they can tie everything together and hit all the right notes!
Or just use Convin’s Conversation Intelligence to record, note-taking, and analyze sales conversations.
Step 6: Closing of the deal
This step covers a multitude of sales funnels stages, such as:
- Budgeting
- Sending the project offer
- Negotiations
- And the closing of the deal
- Objection Handling
Each and every stage of this is very crucial, and presentation plays an important part in all the above and for that, listening to your customers is very crucial.
Being a sales rep is hard sometimes because you have to be able to make your product seem appealing over and over again.
Of course, selling the same product over and over again can get boring, so that’s why sales reps need to remember every detail of every customer interaction they partake in during the day. The best reps are very aware of how focused they need to be on their target audience. They listen carefully throughout each exchange and remember all the necessary points, which makes their job more manageable when they ultimately have to close the deal in which they need to apply those details.
Step 7: Onboard the customer
Define even the onboarding material and steps or the product delivery step. Your customers do not face any block or hindrance while instilling the product with their current processes and team.
Even provide self-hep materials like FAQs, training videos, demo videos, and always serving customer support contact details.
Step 8: Follow up
Keep in constant contact with your customer by providing them materials that can aid them in better using the product and even checking with them through surveys and feedback to see if they are facing any challenges.
This would not just improve your CSAT score but eventually make your customers your product advocate for the market.
A streamlined sales process is the key to cracking the constant flow of revenue.
If you’re ready to create a sales process that drives revenue, we encourage you to download the free sales process template and follow the steps outlined in the guide. The process design we’ve outlined has been tested and refined, and we’re confident it will help you get the results you’re looking for!
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