Sales Process & Selling Skills

Being able to make the most of new business opportunities, by making it straightforward and pain free for customers to do business with you, is critical to the success of any business. That’s one of the reasons why having a tried and tested sales process in place is so important.

It’s commonplace for the major functions within a business, such as finance and human resources, to be built on some solid and proven processes, albeit, a response to regulatory and legislative demands. Yet, while ‘selling’ is certainly a major function in all businesses, it’s surprising how few businesses have a standardised sales process in place.

The chances are you have something like a sales process in your business, but it’s equally likely that this is not documented, managed nor trained in the way other key business processes are. As a result, you might not be making it straightforward and pain free for customers to do business with you and you might not be making the most of new business opportunities.

A successful sales process is a series of proven and documented steps that provides the most efficient and effective route for sales people to take to identify and engage with customers and to win new business. This process is commonly supported by a system (e.g. CRM), which enables the recording and reporting of activities (inputs) for each step, and the recording and reporting of the results (outputs) of this activity.

With the right sales process in place for your business, you can align all you do with the typical buying process a prospect or potential buyer follows to investigate and select solutions. This alignment, makes it easier for customers to identify that they have a need for your products and services, and it motivates them to buy. Furthermore, a proven sales process ensures your customers have the best possible buying experience – one which encourages them to buy again.

Here at PDT we recognise that you cannot just create and implement a sales process, you also need to engage the team that will be following the process. And this is where selling skills come in. Like no other time before, it is essential for successful businesses to have effective, motivated and well-trained sales people and sales managers.

With our Performance Development Consultancy, we can help pinpoint and eradicate the sales performance gaps and barriers that exist and will guide you to immediate, practical and cost effective steps to improve sales. If you have already pinpointed the development required for your people, you could try one of our innovative “aspirational selling” programmes.

An effective sales process also provides you with invaluable sales information and sales management tools. It provides your business with a framework, against which you can measure both the sales performance of your sales people and the sales performance of your business as a whole. With standardised sales steps in place, you can measure the activity for each step (the inputs) – effectively measuring the effort being expended. Furthermore, you can also measure the quality of this activity, by measuring the results (the outputs). For example, knowing how many initial sales meetings it takes for a sales person to make one new sale, would provide an insight into the quality of his or her initial sales meetings.

With the right sales process and CRM system in place and accurate recording and reporting by the team, you’ll also be provided with a real-time view of your sales pipeline (future sales forecasted for a given timeframe).

If you would like to discuss how PDT can help you with creating a sales process and/or training your staff in selling skills contact us now.