Every sales job spec and every sales resume says “high energy” in the first paragraph. But high: “commitment to process” is more important.

There are two processes at work in every sale. Part 2 will talk about the other one but today let’s focus on the Sales Process. My last post (sorry for the length, I felt the granular detail was needed) talked about expectations, the importance of defining and measuring them, and that company success is dependent on each department meeting their expectations. The post delved into a hypothetical sales process:

Lead → Demo → Evaluation → Eval Success → Order

While a rudimentary process, it’s pretty similar to many sales processes in use today and it has the benefit of being pretty simple. What is not explicitly stated but should be implicitly understood is the following:

• Lead…for the right type of person (title/responsibility) at the right type of company.
• Demo…to the right people (not person) after doing some discovery about their business and needs.
• Evaluation…with proper resource commitment from the customer, an agreed upon test plan with specific metrics that define success and an understanding of timing and cost upon success.
• Eval Success…agreed to and documented by the customer and tying back to the test plan and business needs defined earlier.
• Order…roughly in accordance with the timing and costs agreed to prior to the evaluation (some negotiation and procurement tax is inevitable).

Obvious right? We all know we don’t want to do a demo to the wrong people at a company or to a company that would never be able to buy our solution. We know that blindly giving our revolutionary new technology to someone to test will be much less effective than if they let us guide them to the truly impactful capabilities. But we are all in a rush to get to the end. I can’t tell you how many times a sales rep has told me “No, Mr. Big said he doesn’t need to do an eval! He’s got the budget and loved the demo so much he’s just going to buy! We need to give him our best proposal!” The worst thing is that once in 100 times, Mr. Big actually buys. The other 99 times someone in his process says “What were the results of the proof of concept? What other products did you look at? Who else in the company has used it? Can I try it?” This inevitably happens two weeks before your quarter/year end and there is no way to restart the process in time to complete a transaction on time. So the opportunity pushes out and loses momentum.

The best sales people I’ve worked with control their internal clock and live by both processes (look for Part 2). Early in a sales cycle they build a plan that allows time to take the customer through milestones that will give them the information they need to confidently “spend the company’s money like it was their own”. They still get surprised, everyone does, but they usually have time to right the ship because they have effectively planned for it.

• Define a process
• Communicate it clearly to your entire team
• Measure each step to identify the cause of bottlenecks
• Take steps to remove the bottleneck
• Circle back to the top to refine the process further

The process is the circulatory system of any sales organization.

Good luck and good selling!

Please comment.  It would be great to have a conversation about selling and to hear a story or two.  If I don’t reply instantly, feel free to talk amongst yourselves until I get back ;-).

Image by Vince Vassallo via http://vincevassallo.blogspot.ca/