Sales Performance Process: Mapping Sales Success

Critical Skills for Leaders

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A sales process is simply a series of customer-focused steps that enables sales professionals to substantively increase win rates, build customer retention, and increase revenue production. Each step consists of several key activities and has a predictable, measurable outcome.

Not all salespeople are rainmakers. In fact, only 20% of the sales population possess the intuition and luck to make things happen. With these sales personalities, your best bet is to let them "do their thing" with some management to make sure your goals are met and your company image maintained. The remaining 80% of salespeople are most successful when they follow a specific sales process that details steps along the way and the tools to use at each step.

As the markets in which you operate become more competitive and complex, a key to managing the consistent achievement of revenue goals is implementing and managing an effective and well-designed sales process.
Creating a standardised Sales Performance Process will:

• increase your sales pipeline visibility, giving you a greater sense of control knowing where your sales are coming from at any one time
• reinforce best practices and behaviours
• accelerate sales execution and overall performance
• lead to more sustainable revenue growth
• improve your forecasting accuracy and predictability
• provide average and poor performers with a proven track and methodology for consistently bringing in sales
• provide you and the sales team with a common sales performance language and an easy method for identifying and training skill gaps.

When your company uses an effective sales methodology it will help separate you from the “commoditized” market in which your competitors play, and will make you less vulnerable to price challenges.

So what exactly is an effective Sales Performance Process?

A well thought out and manageable Sales Performance Process is simply a way of mapping out all the steps, actions and skills required to take a sale from beginning to close, follow up and service. You should define and standardise your company's sales process based on best practices within your team, your industry, and the sales field in general.

Selling is both a science and an art. Whilst most top performing salespeople have an innate talent and sell intuitively, on further probing research has found that they actually tend to follow their own specific road map or a blueprint for success. Many of these winning salespeople may not be aware of the fact they follow a process, let alone articulate it! They tend to follow their own repeatable system, often at a subconscious level.

Why do you need a more formalised sales process?

To identify whether you need to invest the time and effort to engineer your sales process, first of all, look at your own customers:

• Are they becoming more demanding?
• Do they have more options to choose from to meet their needs?
• Are they becoming more sophisticated in how they analyse these alternatives before making a decision?
• Is it becoming more challenging for your business to attract and retain customers?

Now look internally:

• Does your sales team sometimes react sluggishly when opportunities arise?
• Do your salespeople have trouble projecting a consistent, professional image?
• Do promising customer commitments too often fall through the cracks?
• Do negotiations go awry at the last minute, resulting in a bad deal – or no deal at all?
• Is your customer data out of date and dispersed in silos across the company?
• Are you tired of technological solutions that are so complicated they never get used?

When you implement a well-designed and manageable sales process you will improve your sales team’s:

• forecast accuracy
• ability to proactively pin-point bottlenecks and success roadblocks
• predictability and consistency
• conversion rates
• ramp up time for new hires
• decrease in sales cycles
• communication
  

And your:

• pipeline visibility
• ability to ensure that handovers flow easier with less opportunities falling through the cracks
• optimisation of your one on one Sales Performance Coaching efforts

Sales Managers that use a standardised Sales Performance Process to leverage their sales team’s efforts are far more likely to sustain competitive advantage over organisations that rely on their Rainmakers.

How do you “clone” your “Rainmakers”

The challenge for many Sales Managers is that their sales budgets are dependent on keeping their sales “rainmakers” satisfied and within the team. They are always at risk of their top performers either being recruited away or promoted. To avoid reliance on this somewhat risky sales strategy, you need to ensure you develop a standardised sales success road map and train the rest of the sales team on how to follow it successfully.

As Managers we are taught that:

• You can’t manage what you can’t measure;
• If you can’t see it, you can’t measure it;
• If you can’t measure it, you can’t understand it;
• If you can’t understand it, you can’t improve it. You manage things – you lead people!

As a Sales Manager your goal is to support your salespeople to successfully achieve their sales goals. Therefore, by documenting, replicating and reinforcing the “best practices” and behaviours of the best sales performers in your organisation, you will create a predictable road map for your sales team to follow, ensuring their success more often.

Whilst a well-defined Sales Performance Process is no “magic bullet”, it will help your individual salespeople to:

• Identify and qualify leads.
• Find more opportunities for repeat business amongst your existing customers.
• More consistently position the unique value that your company can deliver versus that of the competition.
• Discover your customer’s true “pain points” and map these needs to your products or services.
• Identify and deliver convincing proof that your products can meet those needs.
• Better assess the revenue potential for a given customer – and be able to view consolidated information for all customers in your sales pipeline.
• Negotiate and close more sales.
• Build stronger relationships with customers and business partners.
• Put a follow up process in place after the sale that helps drive customer satisfaction – and generates repeat business and referrals.

An effective sales process will identify and provide you and your sales team with critical success milestones and the specific and measurable actions required to drive those milestones. Sales Managers that use a standardised Sales Performance Process to leverage their sales team’s efforts are far more likely to sustain competitive advantage over organisations that are reliant on “just a few good men/women!”

A well engineered Sales Performance Process is the closest you will ever come to cloning your Rainmakers!