When a company adds dynamic sales processes to their business metrics, performance improves on every level. A well-defined process acts as a roadmap, guiding reps for each stage of the sales process by tracking key metrics in this process. You will empower sales reps with clear steps. You’ll drive more predictable revenue, and you’ll identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement. I’m John Smoak, founder and CEO of MyOnlineAdmin, and I want to talk to you today about sales processes and why they are so important.
00:00:34:15 – 00:01:04:01
John Smoak
CSO Insights did a study a few years ago on sales processes, and what they found is when a company has a dynamic sales process aligned to their business metrics, 72% of their reps make quota. On the other end of the spectrum, when there is no formal process, less than half of their reps make quota. The better your sales process, the more likely your sales reps are to be successful.
00:01:04:04 – 00:01:34:27
John Smoak
Your company is going to have better execution because you have better consistency in your pipeline. You’re going to have happier employees because they’re going to make quota more often. Things just go better when you have a good, strong sales process. If you have a CRM system, the process should be baked into your CRM. Mailman an admin. We help small companies and mid-sized companies and even large companies with sales processes, but mainly we help small and mid-sized businesses manage their CRM to be as effective as possible.
00:01:35:02 – 00:01:57:22
John Smoak
We’re part of the sales operations team, the marketing operations team. Give us a call if you need help. I’m going to show you what good sales process design looks like. This is going to be the end result of where we’re headed. It’s a very busy slide, but it’s a very detailed way to maximize the efficiency of your sales reps.
00:01:57:25 – 00:02:18:22
John Smoak
One thing I did mention earlier, it also helps get new sales reps up to speed or quickly by having a defined process to follow. A sales process always starts with a series of stages. I’ve named those stages for this purpose. Stage one. Stage two. Stage three. We’re going to talk about naming conventions of stages in a few moments.
00:02:18:22 – 00:02:43:27
John Smoak
What those stages are designed to do is have a series of activities, similar type activities. For example, if you’re trying to qualify a new prospect, you’re going to be doing some research. You’re going to do email outreach, phone call outreach, text outreach, things like that, trying to get that first conversation. Once you get that first conversation, there’s some specific information you’re trying to uncover by those activities.
00:02:44:03 – 00:03:02:10
John Smoak
Example who’s the decision maker? Can I get to the decision maker? And of course, you’re always trying to get that next meeting as well. All of that information is designed to help you make a decision. Do I drop out now and just know I did this because there’s not really an opportunity and I don’t want to waste time?
00:03:02:12 – 00:03:27:15
John Smoak
Or do we have enough to move to the next stage? In the next stage, we have a different set of activities there we’re going to execute on. In this case, we’ll put together a call plan. We’ll do a discovery meeting. On the call plan, we’ll have the questions that we need to ask. And then of course when we’re finished, we’ll ask for a follow up meeting hall that’s designed to uncover specific information.
00:03:27:17 – 00:03:48:23
John Smoak
Most companies care about timeline and budget and decision making process, and who put together the requirements for the opportunity. And what’s their pain and what’s their gain? Things like that that, believe it or not, a lot of sales reps just don’t know to ask your activities. Your outcomes could be different, but you’re trying to gather information so you can make a decision.
00:03:48:25 – 00:04:09:15
John Smoak
Is there any value that you can bring here or not? Should, you know, bid this or should you keep going? If you should keep going, then you go to the next stage and you have a series of activities that you’re doing, and those activities are designed to uncover some outcomes, some information, so you can make another decision. Do you keep going?
00:04:09:17 – 00:04:38:12
John Smoak
It’s really a pretty simple process applies to sales process design, new client onboarding, project processes. Any process that you have, not just sales process, would follow the same pattern. Now, in the end, we want to make sure that you have a full sales process or possibly more than one sales process. So a lot of clients have a new logo or a new company process, which is very detailed.
00:04:38:12 – 00:04:59:14
John Smoak
There’s a lot of things that you have to do to sell something to a client. You’ve never done business with legal T’s and C’s prove yourself demos, whatever those types of things are. Now, if you’ve already done business with this company before, and you already have your legal T’s and C’s taken care of, you can sell them additional products and services more easily.
00:04:59:16 – 00:05:22:04
John Smoak
Or perhaps you have some products and services that are renewable. So every year you need to renew those. You’re not having to go through the entire process again. You’re able to leverage existing relationships, existing contracts, things like that to make things go go more smoothly. However, you do still need to be able to roll everything up into your pipeline.
00:05:22:06 – 00:05:43:16
John Smoak
Whether it’s a renewal, an add on, a change order, a new project, anything like that into one pipeline. In order to do that, we want to make sure and name our stages generic enough so that they will fit in all of those buckets. Now, a renewal process might not have every stage, but it’s certainly going to have the proposing stage.
00:05:43:18 – 00:06:04:28
John Smoak
An add on is not going to have every stage. You may have a qualifying stage because you want to qualify that this add on make sense? You may not need a discovery, though you may go straight to proposing. So each of your different types of sales processes, if they do have proposing, the activities you’re going to do in the proposing stage probably differ.
00:06:05:01 – 00:06:27:14
John Smoak
You don’t have to go through legal T’s and C’s if you’ve already. If you’re already doing business with them and have a contract in place. Same thing with qualifying. An add on is way different than qualifying them. Brand new customer. So you want your process to have stages that are generic and be able to have different types of activities in a stage depending on the type.
00:06:27:14 – 00:07:00:25
John Smoak
So qualifying a new logo has different activities and outcomes than qualifying an add on. I hope that makes sense. Now I like to use I n g in my stage names. Qualifying, discovering, validating or solutions, proposing, closing or negotiating stage names like that. Because we’re doing something right, we are qualifying the proposal. There’s multiple activities. We’re discovering information.
00:07:00:25 – 00:07:26:27
John Smoak
We’re validating information. So it signifies that we’re doing something. We know by its very nature that this is considered to be a qualifying opportunity. If we moved to the next stage, if we moved it to a no bid, no value closed, lost, canceled stage, then we know it was not qualified. So I don’t need the stage name to say qualified.
00:07:27:01 – 00:07:50:10
John Smoak
A lot of times people use outcomes for the names of their stages, and the reality is, let’s capture those outcomes separately and let’s make our stages be what they are. For example, proposing in the proposing stage, most companies have an approval process internally, depending on how large the project is. With discounts, we need to give. Does the client meet our credit criteria?
00:07:50:12 – 00:08:12:17
John Smoak
Have we started to share T’s and C’s? Those types of activities are going to go into a proposal, maybe building a presentation and and getting ready to do a big type of proposal. The last thing you’re going to do is actually share that proposal, hopefully face to face or by will email to the client or whatever. But once you’ve actually proposed it, that’s when you move to the closing stage.
00:08:12:17 – 00:08:33:10
John Smoak
So we don’t need to call that stage post, because we’re doing a lot of things to get to the point where we can propose it. So I hope that makes sense. I like to use ING and all of my stage names. It just seems to make more sense. This is the first part of sales process design. We’re also going to cover defining our stage names.
00:08:33:13 – 00:09:00:05
John Smoak
We’re going to define probabilities or confidence levels. We’re going to define forecast category. So we can help with the timing of our forecast. And we’re even going to look at very detailed ways to come up with a confidence level in our opportunities. I hope you enjoyed this video. Please subscribe so that you can be informed when part two and part three drop.
00:09:00:07 – 00:09:01:23
John Smoak
Thank you and have a blessed day!