The sales process comprises of systematic steps taken by your sales team to transform a prospect from the early stages of buying towards accomplishing a closed deal. It is mostly concerned with developing a relationship with customers by posing questions, educating them, and offering them value. This process takes place in similar steps in most companies, and each step is valuable.
A sales process can be regarded as a map that guides one’s sales team on their journey to convert potential leads into actual customers. Without such a map, the lead generation efforts of your marketing team would simply go to waste. A standardized sales process may help sales reps with low experience to accelerate their efforts with best practices and learn what to do at various sales stages.
The following are the ways to build up a successful sales process flow:
Prospecting
It is the process of sourcing early-stage and new leads to begin working with the sales training process. This is a crucial part of the sales process and part of the weekly or daily workflow of most sales reps. Some ways to prospect are taking part in industry events and conferences, doing online research, and seeking referrals from colleagues and clients about who will be interested in your products.
Connect with and qualify leads
This involves the initiation of reps to get in touch with such early-stage leads for gathering information. The next part of this step is to qualify new leads- deciding whether they are a good fit for your business and whether they will proceed further into the journey of the buyer.
Research the company
In this step, the sales rep learns more about every company and prospect. Such research helps reps to empathize with customers and be able to provide a more personalized and tailor-made experience which helps in closing the deal. The vital part of this stage is to understand the challenge of every prospect and to offer your service or product as the solution.
Provide an effective pitch
This presentation step involves the sales rep running a formal service or product demonstration for your prospect. This step will consume much time and so appears much later in the sales process. It is reserved for more qualified prospects. You must tailor every presentation for meeting the unique use case of specific prospects as well as their pain points.
Handle objections
The scenario of potential customers having objections and complaints about the proposal and presentation of your salesperson is not uncommon. In fact, this is to be expected and so has been deemed as a separate step in the sales process. Your sales team must be ready to deal with any kinds of objections.
Closing the deal
At this step of the sales process, there are some last stage activities that happen as a deal approaches closing. This step varies widely from one company to the other. It may involve the delivery of a proposal or quote, negotiating, or accomplishing the buy-in of decision-makers.
Every sales
person desires closure of the deal. It must result in a mutually beneficial, contractual agreement between the seller and the prospect. After the closure of the deal, the sales rep can gain a commission on the price negotiated with the customer.
Nurturing sales
Though closure of deals seems the final step of the sales process, it is not the point at which sales reps cease working with customers. The sales rep must not only confirm that customer gains what she ordered but also serve to transition customers to which team is accountable for customer success.
The final step of the sales process is to continue to communicate and reinforce value to customers. This offers opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell.
In sum, these are some of the steps by which the sales process moves smoothly for best outcomes.
