Business
Sales Process
The sales process refers to the series of steps and activities that a company or salesperson follows to identify, engage, and close deals with potential customers. It typically involves prospecting, qualifying leads, making sales presentations, handling objections, and ultimately closing the sale. The goal of the sales process is to systematically move prospects through the stages of the buying cycle to ultimately convert them into customers.
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10 Key excerpts on "Sales Process"
eBook - ePubSales Is a Team Sport
Aligning the Players with the Playbook
- John Fuggles(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Business Expert Press(Publisher)
The Sales Process is one part of a system. It has component parts such as the Sales Funnel, the Pipeline, and works in parallel with CRM systems or perhaps Opportunity Tracking Systems (OTS) and then has wrapped around its skills, tools, techniques, data, products, and, of course, people. When all is considered, a Sales Process is not so much a fast jet rather a load of nuts and bolts flying in close formation. It may not always be joined up, but these individual parts do seem to serve a common purpose and work together.According to Customer Centric Selling, the Sales Process is “a defined set of repeatable, interrelated activities from market awareness through servicing customers that allows communication progress to date to others within the company.”Diagrams of a Sales Process are either a linear chart or a circle. Accepting it is a process, the cyclical design makes more sense. What is often drawn is not so much the process but the hub of an altogether more complex series of processes and procedures leading to projects. Even before the process starts, there is work to be done. In much the same way that games are often won and lost long before the team gets on the pitch. But let us start with the basics.Some leads will be new and may have been acquired, they called you or you called them—“cold calling”—to qualify them as a potential customer. Other leads will be of or from existing accounts or from existing contacts. So, let us start there.Existing CustomersExisting customers we should also include lapsed customers and long-standing contacts or companies that have never been customers. Accepted they are not customers but the journey to make them a customer begins at the same point.A company that already buys a product or service from you is a great place to start. We can sell them more stuff (one of my all-time favorite words) and, if we do not have anything new to sell them, we can always find a way to expand our portfolio or develop additional offerings that may appeal.
eBook - ePubThe Street-Savvy Sales Leader
A Guide to Building Teams that Consistently Win New Business
- Mark Welch(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Figure 1 Publishing(Publisher)
5There is also, depending on your organization, the potential to have more than one Sales Process. You may have one for new customer acquisition versus account management and share of wallet (SOW ) growth. You may have modified Sales Processes for different markets or industries you sell into and even a different process for different applications or solutions you sell.Stages of the Sales Process
There is a lot of room to customize the Sales Process to fit how Sales is organized, the industry you’re in and your target market. The better aligned the Sales Process is to the buying process, the more relevant the sales discussions and reviews will be and the more accurate the forecast outcome should be. The goal of each stage is to take a potential opportunity to the next stage until the business is closed. Figure 5.1 illustrates a generic and widely used example of the Sales Process.Figure 5.1: The Sales ProcessLinda Richardson, in her book Changing the Sales Conversation , describes the essence of the Sales Process very well: “An effective Sales Process is very specific, defining:- the major stages in the sales cycle;
- objectives to accomplish in each stage;
- selling activities to carry out in each stage based on best practices;
- verifiable outcomes to spell out actions that clients must take to signal their readiness to move to the next stage;
- sales tools to support your sales efforts at each stage; and
- dialogue models to help you deliver your message clearly.”6
It is advantageous to work with Marketing on this process to facilitate a consistent and robust funnel that the business can use to react in real time to developments and opportunities in the market. The actual details of the process will vary by target market—for example, small business, mid-market, enterprise and government markets—as well as the channel.
No longer available |Learn more- (Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Orange Apple(Publisher)
____________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ____________________ An effective Sales Process can be described through steps that walk a salesperson from meeting the prospect all the way through closing the sale. Often a bad sales experience can be analyzed and shown to have skipped key steps. This is where a good Sales Process mitigates risk for both buyer and seller. A solid Sales Process also has the dramatic impact of forecasting accuracy and predictability in revenue results. Many companies develop their own Sales Process; however, off the shelf versions are available from a number of companies in the sales performance improvement industry. A large number of these methods have been described by their promoters in books available to the public, primarily addressing tactics employed by an individual sales representative. These provide a customizable process and a set of electronic tools that can be freestanding or can be integrated if required with the company's SFA, CRM, or other opportunity management system. Sales lead A sales lead , or Sales Lead, is the identity of a human or entity potentially interested in purchasing a product or service, and represents the first stage of a Sales Process. The lead may have a corporation or business associated (a B2B lead) with the person(s). Sales leads are generic leads - i.e a person signs up for a type of offer, instead of a particular company or brand. come from either lead generation companies processes such as trade fair|trade shows, direct marketing, advertising, Internet marketing, spam, gimmicks, or from sales person prospecting activities such as cold calling. For a sales lead to qualify as a sales prospect, or equivalently to move a lead from the process step sales lead to the process sales prospect , qualification must be performed and evaluated. Typically this involves identifying by direct interrogation the lead's product applicability, availability of funding and time frame for purchase.
eBook - ePubHow to Sell
Succeeding in a Noble Profession: The Complete Guide to Prospecting, Selling and Negotiating to Win
- Charles Fellingham, Andre O'Brien(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Morgan James Publishing(Publisher)
CHAPTER 3
The Sales Process
W hy do we need a process? We believe that salespeople like a process and have a desire to know the step they are in during the evolution of the sale. Following our Sales Process will keep you organized, will help you think before you speak, and drive you towards the commitment phase with structured confidence.W. Edwards Deming, the father of modern quality, once explained why products fail13 . It is caused by variation in the product’s manufacturing, materials, use or maintenance processes. A whole quality movement was built around that very thought and still survives today. This movement demands great effort to reduce or eliminate variation in each step of manufacturing. For every successful product or service, there is a refined, uniform process followed and executed with consistent precision. This also could be true for salespeople who want to match their valued solutions to business needs.We have constructed a Sales Process to help you understand the simple steps to advance your sales conversations and opportunities. The process flows from one step to the next and each element builds on the next. These steps show the natural progression used to build most business relationships. They are:1. Build a Bond – connect, build trust, promote cooperation.2. Explore the Gap – Be curious, be a consultant, explore needs.3. Build a Bridge – Reveal buying motive.4. Bridge the Gap – summarize needs, present your solution.5. Walk the Bridge – handle objections, motivate the sale.6. Close the Gap – get their commitment.In this chapter we will expand on each element of the Sales Process.STEP 1: BUILD A BOND
This step is essential to any Sales Process. We do not sell in a vacuum. We need information to effectively sell and thus we need the prospect's cooperation to obtain the details we will use to construct a solution. We must consult before we construct our solution. And we must connect before we consult.
No longer available |Learn moreMedical Sales Professional
Selling into the Global Healthcare Markets
- Roy Layfield PhD(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Austin Macauley Publishers(Publisher)
The Basic Sales Process
Selling is a technique that none of us are born with. Some people, however, are naturally adept at this whilst the rest of us have to consciously learn, and apply, the necessary skills. Regardless of where you sit in this equation, the basic Sales Process remains the same. Those who apply it without thinking, do exactly the same thing as those who think about every single step. Over time, it’s easy for even the most inexperienced salesperson to become the very best, simply by applying these steps in the right order, and being strategic about their approach.Briefly, it begins with the building of rapport, followed by establishing the customer’s need – a process that often involves creating that need until they can see it for themselves. This step uses lots of probing or questioning (without turning the call into an interrogation), and is followed immediately by the actual selling step of meeting their needs with your product or service. At this point, the customer may have some legitimate concerns or raise objections, and as you successfully address each of these, you can move toward the final and most important step of all, i.e. closing the call and asking for the sale. In its simplest form, that is how you sell any product to any customer , and it works perfectly.Of course, that’s a very simplistic overview of just what’s involved, and to use these techniques effectively then you need to know far more about utilising each step to its best potential. In this chapter, I’ll break each of them down for you, i.e.- Building rapport
- Establishing the need
- Meeting the need
- Handling objections
- Closing the sale
The detailing process itself is quite a soft sell
eBook - ePubSelling Your Value Proposition
How to Transform Your Business into a Selling Organization
- Cindy Barnes, Helen Blake, Tamara Howard(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Kogan Page(Publisher)
05The Sales Process
Many readers of this book will be familiar with the Sales Process, the sales cycle and the different types of selling. If you are one of these readers, we would suggest you skip this chapter and move on to read about sales storytelling in Chapter 6 , a summary of our Laws of Value Proposition Selling in Chapter 7 , or ‘Creating the selling organization’ in Chapter 8 .If, on the other hand, you are relatively new to the nuances of selling, you may find this chapter useful. In order to properly exploit your sales proposition it is important to understand each stage of the sales cycle from both the salesperson’s and the customer’s perspective.Stages of the Sales Process
A quick review of the standard Sales Process shows what is happening at each stage:- to progress the sale;
- to show what is going on in the mind of the customer;
- and to illustrate the different activities of the two sales types mentioned so far.
The circular diagram in Figure 5.1 illustrates the process for any type of sales opportunity and for all types of sales approaches. In large organizations many of these processes may be occurring simultaneously as different sales opportunities arise and customer needs are met. For new customers, the first sales engagement may start as early as the ‘suspect’ stage.Figure 5.1 The eight steps of the Sales ProcessThe eight steps of the Sales ProcessSOURCE Verve Consulting, 2016Many organizations use these terms loosely without consideration for what each means in terms of what is going on in a prospective customer’s mind and what a salesperson should be doing. This process is appropriate for any
eBook - ePubCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) for Medium and Small Enterprises
How to Find the Right Solution for Effectively Connecting with Your Customers
- Antonio Specchia(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Productivity Press(Publisher)
Chapter 3 Sales Process Management
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148388-3At its beginning, customer relationship management systems were developed mainly for customer care/services purposes. This usage was firstly developed by Thomas Siebel, and it was CRM’s main purpose till the first decade of this century when the technology started gaining more popularity in the sales departments of medium businesses in business-to-business (B2B) markets. Today among medium and small businesses that implement CRM, almost all of them aim to enhance the Sales Process management. This shift into the revenue-generating area could be among the reasons that have boosted the demand for CRM technology.In this chapter, we will describe the secrets of CRM for Sales Process management and how to implement it. The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:- Sales Process design
- Sales Process stages
- Lead-in
- – Contacting
- Discovery opportunities
- Qualification
- – Qualification methods
- – Qualification purpose and outcome
- – Developing solutions
- – Negotiation
- Learning opportunity
- Purpose and outcome
Sales Process Design
The sales job has always been considered unpredictable by definition. And it is still beyond direct control: even the most successful salespersons are able to win only a slice of all the opportunities they come across. At least in normal conditions, in my country we have a motto with regard to sales: you can fool one person all the time or everyone once, but you can’t fool everyone all the time.* The logic is clear: we can’t control other people’s decisions; we can try to influence them and we can become very convincing using the art of persuasion,†
eBook - PDF- Joseph F. Hair, Jr., Rolph Anderson, Rajiv Mehta, Barry Babin(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
11 The good news for most of us is that, although some people may have more natu- ral ability than others, selling is not an art or innate talent but a discipline that most people can learn how to do. There’s a specific selling process to learn and all you need is a disciplined, organized approach to carry it out. If you have that, you’ll outperform others who don’t understand the process nearly every time. 12 What Salespeople Do: The Stages of the Selling Process Although there are diverse types of customers, products, services, and sales situations, there are only seven basic interacting, overlapping stages that form the selling process (SP). Here they are, in order: 1. Prospecting and qualifying 2. Planning the sales call (preapproach) 3. Approaching the prospect 4. Making the sales presentation and demonstration 5. Negotiating sales resistance or objections 6. Confirming and closing the sale 7. Following up and servicing the account 13 Continuous Cycle or Wheel of Selling The seven stages of the SP are best depicted as a continuous cycle or wheel of over- lapping stages, as shown in Figure 4.1. Once the wheel of selling is set in motion, it continues to rotate from one stage to the next. Thus, it’s easy to see that stage seven isn’t really the end of the cycle but rather a new beginning, because the salesperson’s follow-up and service activities can generate repeat sales or purchases of new products and services as customer needs grow. The wheel is not a rigid mechanism that can’t be stopped, changed, or reversed if necessary. Sometimes, the salesperson may need to skip over, redesign, or return to a previous stage in the SP when an initial approach or turn of the wheel fails to work. Sensitivity and flexibility in responding to feedback from customers about their needs and wants is critical for the salesperson to make the most effective and efficient use of the SP process. As seen in Figure 4.1, the wheel’s center axle is comprised of prospects and customers.
eBook - PDFEntrepreneurial Marketing
A Blueprint for Customer Engagement
- Beth Goldstein(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
184 Learning Objectives In this chapter, you will learn to • define the differences and similarities between sales and marketing goals. • design sales tracking processes and systems that align with business and marketing goals. • identify the processes that need to be created so sales, marketing, and product development collaborate to address customer needs. • differentiate between B2B (business to business), B2C (business to consumer), and C2C (customer to customer) sales and marketing strategies to identify which path is right for your company. • analyze the data you have to project sales targets, goals, and other information required to make informed business decisions. SALES IS ALL ABOUT BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS The Sales Process is critical in building relationships. Unfortunately, sales and marketing departments, even in small companies, do not always spend the time required to ensure they understand each oth- er’s goals to successfully align their activities. In this chapter, we will show you how to develop Sales Processes and systems to analyze your current data and track future data so sales tactics are aligned with marketing goals. Your goal is to ensure these two critical areas of your business work hand in hand to deliver the right message to the right profit-generating markets—those identified in the cus- tomer discovery process. Each has a role in securing and retaining customers for the benefit of achieving overall business goals, and it’s critical that these areas collaborate on ensuring they both have their eyes focused on the same proverbial ball. In the next chapter, we’ll do a deep dive into sales skills that you personally need to develop to be successful. We will also dis- cuss the various sales stages that many individuals go through to be successful, such as phone call preparation, in person appointments, and follow-up and servicing accounts.
eBook - PDFSales Management N5 SB
TVET FIRST
- N Horn(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Macmillan(Publisher)
82 MODULE 5 THE Sales Process OVERVIEW At the end of this module, you should be able to: • Explain the importance of continuously prospecting/canvassing clients as well as the various prospecting techniques that may be used to gain new clients, and be able to describe the most important criteria that a person must satisfy to qualify as a potential client • Explain the importance of good preparation for the sales presentation • Explain and describe the various approach techniques that may be used for a specific product or service • Correctly and effectively use a predetermined sales technique in practice on a potential client as well as be able to judge which sales technique is most suitable for certain products • Elucidate the types of objections raised by clients and the techniques that may be used to counter objections, demonstrate the techniques and relate these to the objections • Explain and differentiate between the closing techniques that may be used in a sales presentation as well as the situations most suitable for each technique • Explain that the placing of an order is not the end of the sales transaction and that after-sales service is very important for the development of goodwill, which can lead to further sales • Explain how after-sales service minimises cognitive dissonance in clients and assists in developing loyalty among clients • Apply the acquired knowledge of prospecting, presentations, approach techniques, sales closes, and after-sales service in a variety of sales situations. 83 UNIT 5 .1 PROSPECTING/ CANVASSING POTENTIAL CLIENTS Why is prospecting important? A prospect is an abbreviation for a prospec-tive customer. A prospect is therefore a per-son or a business who may buy products or services from you, the salesperson. Figure 5.1 A prospect is a person or a business who may buy products or services from you, the salesperson When you are prospecting, you are de-veloping a list of possible new customers.
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