[This article is written by Harshal Patil - harshal.patil@btbventure.com (CEO of BTB Venture Group) - India's leading Demand generation & Market expansion firm.]
Designing a sales process requires careful planning and consideration of your business's unique needs and goals. Here are some general steps to follow when designing a sales process:
Define your sales objectives: Before designing your sales process, you need to identify the specific goals you want to achieve. These objectives could include increasing revenue, improving customer retention, or expanding your customer base.
Map out the sales process stages: Break down the sales process into stages, from prospecting to closing a deal. These stages may vary depending on your business and industry. You'll need to understand your target audience, their needs, pain points, and buying behaviors. This will help you tailor your sales process to meet their needs and expectations.
Define the key activities for each stage: For each stage of the sales process, identify the key activities needed to move a prospect to the next stage. For example, the activities for the prospecting stage could include lead generation, cold calling, and email outreach.
Define the criteria for moving prospects to the next stage: Define the criteria that must be met to move a prospect to the next stage of the sales process. This makes sure that you focus your time and resources on qualified prospects.
Create a sales playbook: Develop a playbook that outlines the sales process, key activities, and criteria for moving prospects to the next stage. This document should be shared with the sales team, and they should be trained on how to follow the process.
Monitor and optimize: Continuously monitor and analyze your sales process's effectiveness to identify areas for improvement. Use data and feedback from the sales team to optimize the process to achieve better results.
What followed was a proliferation of new methodologies, many of which have continued in use ever since. Here's a list of the most popular sales methodologies for complex sales and when they were created:
1967 Sandler Selling System
1978 Miller-Heiman, Strategic Selling
1988 Solution Selling (SPI)
1988 SPIN Selling
1991 Value Selling (as ValueVision Associates)
1993 Customer-Centric Selling
2002 RAIN Selling
2005 Baseline Selling
2011 The Challenger Sale
What if we defined salesmanship in terms that are more meaningful to the people and organizations we are selling to? By doing so, we can better understand the problems we are uniquely equipped to solve and how these problems impact our customers. This allows us to focus on those customers who have these problems and help them understand the impact of these issues on their personal and business success.
To achieve this, we need to help our customers learn more about the issues they face, the questions they should be asking themselves, and what they should look at to understand the importance of addressing these problems. We need to help them make sense of the issues and commit to rethinking what they currently do to commit to change.
In doing so, we can help our customers sort through the overwhelming information they find and focus on that which is most important to what they are trying to achieve. We can also help them organize their change management process, gain support from their organization and management, and understand the risks involved while developing strategies to manage them.
As our customers navigate the changes ahead, we need to recognize the human fears and uncertainty they face with change and help them gain the confidence they need to know they are doing the right thing. We need to help them articulate their goals and the business impact of the solution we provide.
Finally, we need to help them develop and execute the change plan to achieve their goals, demonstrating that we care about them and their success through each step of the process. By focusing on these meaningful and impactful steps, we can redefine what it means to be a successful salesperson.
The methodology you choose will depend on your product (complexity and price) and how your customers prefer to buy. It should serve both your sales reps and your prospects to achieve a win-win outcome. Look for methodologies that provide prospects with value. Education and providing information is one of the best ways to establish trust and improve performance. https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/sales-methodology
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