4 REASONS TO DEFINE YOUR SALES PROCESS BY Dr. Norman Roth Whether your company is business-to-business or business-to-customer, sales are likely the focus of your day-to-day operations. Every business owner knows that focusing on sales is important, but is your sales process defined for your team, or are you simply assuming they know what to do? A lot of sales processes are commonly based on the notion that everybody knows what a sale entails, without clearly defining a strategy,. The result is a partial sales process that doesnt wholly back up sales or the company. Taking the time to craft an in-depth definition is well worth the effort, and can give your company numerous advantages both internally and with your customers. You can predict your revenue. If your sales process is repeatable, there must be an element of predictability at each stage. This predictability is invaluable, as it can help you improve your forecasting accuracy and even predict your revenue based on the number of solid leads you generate. You can identify opportunities for improvement. Your sales process shouldnt be static. Instead, it should be a flexible system thats continuously being improved as a result of feedback and testing by your sales team. You can then tweak and amend the process. You can integrate new staff quickly. Once your process is clearly defined, the task of bringing on new sales reps will be far easier. Forget an ad hoc, disorganized learning process; new team members will have a clearly defined system to get them up to speed quickly. You have a process to manage and analyze. With a system in place, coupled with the expectation that everyone is following the same process, your sales process instantly becomes easier to measure and monitor. People can be given specific targets, and key metrics can be identified and analyzed. Outline your basic sales process, and then clarify each step of that process with the help of their staff members. Once the steps are defined, institute some sort of analytics system and be open-minded about making changes based on your results. Most important, make sure that all individuals involved in the task are clear on the final process you choose. If everyone involved in the creation and utilization of a sales process doesnt fully understand and agree upon its definition, they are liable to run into all kinds of problems down the road.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 23:32:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015