What is sales process management and why is it important?
What is sales process management and why is it important?
When communicating with a potential customer, how do they decide to purchase your product or service? Are there certain stages they go through to complete a sale, or is it a one time, on the spot decision? This is why it is particularly important to get your sales process management right.
A sales process is a process that determines the steps your company takes with a prospect from the initial contact through to their purchase. This will vary depending on your company, and the product and services you offer. The sales process is important to carry out and manage well in your business to help document and highlight the steps you and your sales team takes to complete a sale. For different products and services, you may need different sales processes, so it is important to manage what sales process is preferable for each product. This helps to ensure your sales team aren’t being too pushy or not pushing the sale along enough.
The first step is to think about and list the way your potential customers logically recognise a problem and purchase your product or service as the solution. This will help you get into the mind of your prospect of what they are looking for and what they need to know at each stage of the sales process when purchasing your product. To help you do this you may wish to ask current customers or your sales team to get opinions and ideas.
After you have listed potential stages the customer may go through, it’s time to create your sales process. For each of the steps you have identified, list what the potential customer needs to learn and the sales tools and guides you could give to the prospect to help them move forward. You also need to list the amount of time the potential customer needs at each stage identified and finally your conversion rate - the percentage of prospects that move from each step to the next.
Once you have your sales process and conversion rates, you are able to generate reports on the revenue your sales process will bring. These reports should also help you to identify at what stage a sale will happen and how much revenue each prospect brings.
Now you have a fully established sales process you can look for ways to improve this to help improve your results. You could identify the stage where it may be a little slow and potentially include more materials to give to your prospects to help move the sale along quicker. You could also recognise where some sales reps may fall behind others and give them some extra help and materials to push them to the same level as those performing well.
Once you have been running your sales process, it is just as important to keep documenting its success and identifying ways to improve each stage. Keep running reports at regular intervals and it’s always good to request some feedback from customers and your sales team.
Making an effective sales process management system is particularly important if you are looking to grow your business and improve your sales team’s skills. An effective sales process manager will explain:
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