In this article discover what a sales workflow is and our top tips for how you can improve yours.
What is a sales workflow?
Sales workflow can be described as a set of steps your sales team takes to turn prospects into customers. This usually includes a set of repeatable steps, also commonly known as the sales process or sales funnel, which ultimately helps your sales team boost conversions and make a profit. A sales workflow is critical to have in any business to help improve sales and drive profits. The sales workflow usually involves identifying prospects, qualifying prospects, identifying the prospect’s needs, offering them a solution with your product or service and following them up after their response. Some of the benefits of using a sales workflow in your business include improving your company’s efficiency, as a sales workflow helps to establish a routine, as well as helping you to hold team members accountable if a certain area of the sales process isn’t performing as well as others.
There are many ways you can help to improve your sales workflow in your business - but how do you tell whether your sales process needs improving? Some of the aspects to consider are the number of deals, as well as the size of these deals that are in your pipeline, and whether this is meeting your targets. Also, consider whether the number of leads that turn into sales are reaching a good ratio and look at the average lifetime of each deal from the lead to when the sale closes. If you find that these parts of your business are not meeting your targets you could consider the following to help improve your sales workflow.
To have a successful sales workflow, you must focus mainly on your customers as they are they ones that actually keep your company running and help you make a profit. Creating a strategy that focuses on how your product or service benefits them is essential and once this strategy is created you will find your sales workflow more customer-centric and will see your sales improve.
Another way to improve your sales workflow is to clearly define your sales workflow steps to ensure all your sales reps understand. It is no use creating a sales workflow that only a certain number of your sales team can comprehend, you need to ensure this is created in the simplest forms and explained step-by-step to your entire sales team.
Your sales reps will be continuously repeating your sales workflow with every prospect, so you need to ensure that the steps can be easily replicated to suit every customer. The sales workflow also needs to be easily adapted to particular customers, whilst also ensuring your sales reps are treating every customer the same.
A final way to help improve your sales workflow is to ensure that the workflow is measurable. Having a set way to measure your company’s sales included in your sales workflow will make sure it is easy for you to improve your sales team and sales process in the future. After all, you are only able to assess the success of your sales campaign if you can measure the results.