As sellers, we need a process to convert prospects into paying clients. Although this is rarely a straightforward activity (or a linear one), it helps to think in terms of the steps that can be repeated, managed, and trained. By not understanding these efforts as a process, sales pursuits become disconnected and ineffective.
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3 CRITICAL SALES CONCEPTS – SIMPLIFIED:
Sales Process: the separate and distinct steps to complete a sale from start to finish through the seller’s perspective
Buyer’s Journey: the buyer’s process to investigate, explore, assess, and decide on options to solve a particular business problem or embrace a business opportunity
Sales Strategy: the seller’s game plan to earn the right to progress along each of the steps of the sales process to close the deal
Sales Process
The sales process captures a methodology of wisdom and best practices. It is aimed at organizing how the sales team earns the right to progress along to the next stage of their process with prospects. This is achieved by simplifying the objectives of key interactions with prospects. As the process progresses, it’s important to evaluate it to understand if and when your team faces obstacles, thereby highlighting an opportunity to strategize on how to move forward.
A simple solution sales process can be broken down into five core steps:
As a seller, we need to think about both the objective of each step AND the activities we need to conduct to achieve our goals.
This process can become a checklist and can keep us on track for making progress in our sales pursuits. However, the process, checklist, and activities will be wasted if we don’t have the right intentions as professional salespeople. Our main intention must ALWAYS be to help our prospect in every conversation with insight and value.
This ties to our goal which is to help them solve a problem or achieve desired business outcomes. Ultimately, this helps us focus on the long-term success of our business in addition to both our prospect and client relationships.
As you refine the sales process for your business, your sales team and your industry, it is helpful to consider three things:
The objective of each stage
The core sales activities needed to achieve the objective
The exit criteria which help us understand if and when we have formally completed a stage and have moved into the next
However, the seller’s view of the process is only one half of the equation... the more important side is that of the buyer.
Buyer’s Journey
If the opportunity is qualified, then the buyer is going to proceed through their journey.
There are a number of models out there mapping out the stages of the buyer’s journey (Gartner “spaghetti diagram” etc.); however, one of our favorites comes from Frank Cespedes, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, and author of numerous publications including the book Sales Management That Works – How to Sell In A World That Never Stops Changing.
Frank advises that buyers work through a stream of parallel activities when making a purchasing decision:
Explore
Evaluate
Engage
Experience
These activity streams are not serial and linear (a theory supported by the Gartner “spaghetti diagram” that Frank worked on). As professional salespeople we need to think about our buyer’s view of what is going on and how we help them through THEIR process as opposed to driving them through your sales process (likely created as a template in the CRM system you purchased). These are parallel activity streams and this is a dynamic process. Part of the challenge for the seller is to understand where the buyer is in THEIR journey and provide professional assistance, support, and guidance based on where they are.
When we do this effectively, the buyer begins to understand that we as sellers have their best interest as our priority. This customer-centric approach to selling is the only way to be successful in the long term.
Sales Strategy
Finally, one of the critical elements in professional sales often overlooked these days is sales strategy. This is because many sales professionals get caught up in creating the solution for the deal and then completing the proposal (or RFP response etc.) while neglecting the question of… “Do we have a logical strategy to win the deal?”
Too often salespeople sit back and hope they win the deal, but hope isn’t a sales strategy. For our “must-win” deals in a given quarter, these are what the key questions should be:
What do I do next?
What are my chances of winning this deal?
How do I improve my chances of achieving it?
Although professional selling is often referred to as a performance art, there is some math in sales — particularly as it pertains to strategy.
The core of sales strategy is being able to navigate the various buyers who influence a corporate purchasing decision. This includes understanding and then addressing four groups of factors:
Their professional needs and wants
Their personal needs and wants (emotional)
The degree of influence they have on the purchasing decision
How they feel about your solution
The research is consistent that corporate decisions continue to be made by a committee. Forrester stated that “Now 63% of purchases have more than four people involved — vs. just 47% in 2017...”. Therefore, to win a deal, we need to understand who these buyers are and address both their personal and professional wants from the deal. This is the essence of sales strategy.
In addition, we also need to understand the competitive environment. This will help us understand (and then clarify to the relevant buyers) WHY we think we are the best solution to help them achieve their desired outcomes.
At In the Funnel, we have a framework for doing exactly this (download the ITF Strategy Builder for free). This approach follows an assessment at a point in time in terms of how we are doing on a deal. It then leads us to workshop ideas on how to improve our strategic positioning. This is one area of professional sales where team collaboration is particularly valuable.
By having a simple and consistent framework for assessing our strategic positioning for an opportunity, we can (i) share the status of our deal with our team and (ii) collectively work to improve the success of the sales team and, ultimately, the business.
“It’s never over until it’s over,” says almost every sports coach ever, and the same thing applies in sales!
PS. If you thought Frank Cespedes’ stream of parallel activities was interesting, check out my conversation with Frank on The Selling Well podcast! Be sure to leave a review and rating to let me know what you think.