Effective sales processes increase conversions, convert more prospects into closed agreements, and make sure all of your salespeople provide consumers with a good experience every time, regardless of whom they’re talking to.
Building scalable sales processes that regularly bring in recurring business is a challenge for many sales managers and business owners.
This guide will assist you in identifying the most effective strategies for designing a sales process specifically for your company. Here are the five steps your businesses can take to recraft your sales playbook and win more deals.
1.Start With The Buyer Journey
Understanding the 5 steps of the customer journey will empower you to:
- Help your business develop lasting customer relationships.
- Competitively position your business along each stage of the customer journey because you recognize that the journey is a cycle, not a stand-alone goal.
- Design a digital marketing strategy that will impact every step of the customer journey from developing targeted advertising to helping your customers manage their reputation.
Awareness – Do people know about your business?
Findability – Do customers find your business where they are searching?
Reputation – Do consumers trust your business?
Conversion – Can people easily contact you or buy online?
Advocacy – Do your customers recommend you to others?
2.Develop A Prospecting Guide
The next step in the playbook is to develop a prospecting strategy that drives the sales team to use contextual and omni-channel communications when they make contact.
Far too many management teams treat sales as a 9–5 job, when the reality is business owners are too busy to talk during that time. Here are some insights:
- 4:00–5:30 PM is the best time to call a prospect, while 7:45–8:00 AM is the second-most convenient time.
- Aim to respond to queries within five minutes. Any longer and the chance of making contact exponentially decreases.
- Calling six times results in a 90% chance of contact, so don’t give up after two or three attempts.
3.Develop A Discovery Guide
While clever prospecting can unlock doors, it’s the discovery call that’s key to opening it and moving buyers into the middle of the funnel. And the simple trick with discovery calls is to listen more, talk less.
“What percent of the time are your salespeople talking?”
An effective call is broken into three phases:
- Rapport building
- Thorough discovery of 3–4 business issues
- Relevant logistics and next steps
Create a one-page discovery call document to bring to meetings. Download it here. This shouldn’t be a strict script but rather a guide that helps sales representatives ask the right questions and have productive conversations.
“Imagine a salesperson walking in and recapping exactly what’ s bothering you and framing your problem even better than you can. That salesperson likely increased the probability of closing a deal from 10 percent before the meeting to 50 percent after the meeting.”
The secret sauce to an effective call is to actively listen and summarize what the buyer has said at the end of a conversation.
4.Customize The Pitch For The Buyer
Following the discovery call is the all-important demo, and this is the part of the buyer journey where businesses should avoid a common client pet peeve at all costs: delivering the same generic presentation
given to all prospects.
We aren’t suggesting businesses reinvent the wheel and make a new presentation for each prospect. Rather, they should develop several templates and make the effort to customize the appropriate one to cover the following elements for each meeting:
- Recap the buyer’s context
- Share their vision
- Illustrate service capability to meet buyer needs
- Present case study aligned with buyer context
- Discuss price, integration, training, etc.
- Ask for questions
- Recap findings and ask for business
Whatever you do, don’t make the first slide about your company and harp on about your team, experience, headquarters and products. Leave that till the very end.
5.Personalize The Onboarding Process
In the same vein as the presentation guide, agencies should also customize the onboarding process.
“The same is true for once they sign up—don’t make it a generic onboarding. If you have a different delivery team, make sure they’re in sync with the sales team and understand the buyer’s context and needs.”
An onboarding representative should be capable of summarizing the buyer’s issues and recommend the best approach to setting them up as a customer.
“It’s not completely customized, but it feels custom to them, and they feel heard.”
Is it time to change up your sales playbook?
The sales process has been dramatically transformed in recent years. Gone are the days when businesses can simply hire reps, assign territories, and cold call their way to success with a single talk track.
In order to succeed in this new reality, business owners must rewrite their sales playbook and put buyers’ needs at the center. They must view their relationship with prospects and customers as a journey.
Sales teams must leverage the power of data to understand customer intent while striving to become good listeners and problem solvers. This will allow them to stand out from the pack and dramatically improve
the chances of conversion.
At Creative Canvas Media, we keep your best interest in mind. Our teams use industry best practices and current trends to guide you in finding the right digital marketing strategy for your business.
If you’re ready to focus on your customers, request a no-obligation demo with our team to learn how we have your digital marketing handled.