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Optimising your sales process can double your sales

Sales organisations can benefit immensely from creating and using well defined sales processes that closely mirror the way their clients want to buy from them.

Research conducted by CSO Insights Inc with 1,300 companies indicates that those sales organisations with well-defined and used sales processes achieve on average 17% better performance than those without.

Here are the three main reasons for this.

1. Improved performance of your average sales reps.
Pretty much every sales team has a few great performers. (Our sincere sympathies go to those of you that haven’t!) These people have the skills, experience, tenacity and street-smarts to perform well without much direction. Perhaps 10% of your team fall into this category. 60% of sales people typically sit in the middle of the rankings. Some of these will hit target some of the time. Coaching on sales skills and account / deal strategy can significantly improve performance, but it’s a time consuming commitment. The bottom 30% of the team typically require the most sales support and time for the revenue they pull in.

It’s these bottom two groups that can really benefit from sales process. Equally, it’s these same people where a little good direction and structure can often yield a 30-50% lift in their performance in a relatively short period of time. If you’re achieving that lift in results with 90% of your team, your results are going to significantly improve.

A good sales process is like a roadmap. It provides a consistent, repeatable model for achieving sales. It guides the salesperson through those steps that need to happen to maximise the chances of success. It’s like having a sales coach working with every salesperson, on every deal, confirming key steps like qualification, needs clarification, decision-maker contact etc..

2. Shorten induction time
Recruiting new people into your sales team can be very time-consuming. CSO Insights research indicates most sales organisations have a ramp up period of 3-6 months before a new salesperson is fully productive. Transactional sales environments might be shorter, but a highly consultative sales environment, such as high-tech or professional services, could be far longer. Whatever your ramp-up time, having a well defined sales process will shorten this by walking your new hires through each step in the sale. You won’t eliminate the need for product/service training, along with all the other components of induction, but you’ll make it much more efficient if the fundamentals are built into your sales process. And if, as a result, you can trim a month or more off that ramp-up time, you’re again lifting sales results by 10% plus for each new hire in their first year.

If you’re suffering some turnover in your sales team, or you’re looking to expand your team significantly, effectively defining your sales process is a must.

3. Improve sales forecast accuracy
Sales forecasts are suspect in many businesses. The optimistic salespeople over-rate win probability, while the pessimists might leave some opportunities off their forecasts altogether, perhaps because ‘I didn’t want to raise my sales manager’s expectations.’ Clearly, such forecasts are next to useless. For organisations that must manage inventory, demand or capacity issues based around these forecasts, such an approach can have significant financial implications.

A well defined sales process will have numerous unambiguous milestones that are not subject to whim when it comes to assessing win probability. And by revisiting these milestones on opportunities after they’ve been won or lost, the probability associated with each milestone will progressively become more accurate. Over time, sales forecasts will increase in accuracy, which results in a win-win-win for the salesperson, the sales manager and the business.

Start improving sales productivity today – optimise your sales process
The starting point for optimising sales process comes with a three step methodology review.
A. How are you doing things now?
B. How successful is this methodology / where are the weaknesses?
C. How do we modify and implement an updated sales process?

Many organisations are not approaching this issue for the first time. They are often re-evaluating because a previous methodology has not been effectively taken on board by sales teams, or has become outdated and uncompetitive. Others are generating disappointing results from CRM roll-outs whose sales process capability falls short of what they thought they’d bought. With a few notable exceptions, most CRM systems manage sales process to a cursory level, if at all.

These results clearly don’t mean the goal of optimising sales process is not worth pursuing. But they do mean it’s worth undertaking professionally. .