What is a Sales Process?

Among current sales management priorities, revising and embedding a consistent sales process is consistently in the top three for the clients we are working with. Importantly, having a process isn’t the same as using a process. 40% of organisations say that less than half of their sales force utilise the process the company has in place. Another 30% say the process is followed by less than three quarters of their sales team.

Why have a sales process? The simple answer is that it provides everyone involved in the sales effort a roadmap of what do next, which leads to a higher probability of consistent repeatable success. Few campaigns these days are orchestrated, in any business development environment, by a single individual.

There are many misconceptions about what it means to have a sales process. When asked, many executives tell us their organisation has a defined sales process – however, we often find that sales process is confused with the nomenclature of their sales funnel, or with the steps provided by the CRM or sales automation system they are using. Not only do these so-called sales processes fail to include the critical functions of planning or implementation, they almost never include the enabling sales methodologies.

There are five levels of process prowess ranging from Level 1 which is best described as Anti-process, through to Level Five at the best practice end, which we describe as Trusted Partner status. While there a surprising number of companies we meet who have not formalised their sales process in any way, the majority of companies who do, typically define the seller’s steps in the process.

We recommend that you go even further and align your process with the actions buyers should demonstrate throughout the sales cycle. These buyer actions include things like the buyer explaining why the need is important or indeed critical; outlining timing and budget; identifying key buying influences; offering to make introductions; and detailing purchasing and approval processes. Using these seller and more particularly buyer steps, in the form of “verifiable outcomes” to evidence where each opportunity is within the sales process, makes an enormous difference to sales forecasting accuracy.

Some ask us “Why bother?” If every step in the sales process is the sales person’s to make, it may seem like you control the actions. Unfortunately you can’t close opportunities by yourself. The truest test of your progress towards closing any deal (and thus a much more accurate basis for forecasting) is what the buyer is doing within his / her organisation to advance the sale. The actions taken on the client / customer side to move any deal forward are thus worth tracking closely if you want a pipeline that delivers what you expect – and no surprises.

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