What is a sales process?
A sales process is a set of repeatable steps used to turn a lead into a customer, similar to a road map. The specific details of your sales process depend on the products and services you sell.However, the main steps include:
- Prospecting – Finding or attracting leads
- Qualifying – Connecting with leads and gauging their relevance to your business
- Researching – Learning more about leads and how you can help them
- Presenting – Demonstrating your product or service
- Overcoming – Counteracting any objections or concerns
- Closing – Finalizing the sale
- Repeating – Continuing to communicate and sell to the customer
1.IDENTIFY YOUR SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM
Your sales strategy needs to lead with a clear articulation of the challenge you can help your prospect solve. Here’s why: During the beginning of a sales conversation, your prospect likely doesn’t fully understand the benefits of what you’re selling. The last thing you want to do is immediately treat your product or service like a commodity, rather than a valuable solution to a real business need they have. Do your best to research their needs upfront and start your outreach conversation by explaining what’s in it for your prospect.
2.CLEARLY ARTICULATE END RESULTS
People buy results, not just products or services. Once you’ve captured your prospect’s attention with what they’ll be able to achieve by using your solution, it’s now your job to clearly explain how that’ll happen and what they’ll get after signing up. This sales strategy is particularly relevant if you’re selling a product or service that comes with an upfront fee, requires a complex rollout, time-intensive integrations, or ongoing collaboration with your customers after closing the deal. Your prospect needs to know exactly what they’re going to get as far as deliverables when those milestones will be met, and the downstream impact they’re expected to have on their business.
3.START WITH SMALL NICHE MARKETS
You can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your cold outreach by targeting specific niche markets of people that share common pain points you’ll be able to uniquely address. Rather than reaching out to businesses of all different sizes, industries, and offerings, focus on a narrow grouping of companies to pitch.By working your sales strategy only with this homogenous group of companies, you’ll be able to perfect your pitch for this space much quicker than if you were mixing in businesses of all shapes and sizes.
4.BE FLEXIBLE
During your sales conversations, you’re naturally going to come across new challenges and unique demands from your prospects. This makes sense since each company you work with is structured a little differently, has a distinct set of internal processes and objectives. In selling you are seeking an agreement. Your customer is almost always distrustful and uncertain, not about you, but about themselves. Most salespeople think selling is about gaining trust, but in reality, selling is about getting the customer to trust themselves enough to take action and close—which often takes flexibility.
5.CONNECT WITH THE DECISION-MAKER
It seems obvious that you don’t want to waste time spinning your wheels having countless conversations with lower-level managers who won’t ultimately be able to champion your solution through to implementation. However, there’s an art and science to the sales strategy of finding and connecting with the right decision-maker for what you’re offering. Determine how you can best provide value to your decision-making prospect before opening up a line of communication with them.
- Can you get them featured in a story you’re writing for a major publication?
- What about a positive mention on your corporate blog?
- How about sharing their latest thought leadership piece through your social channels?
6.PERFECT YOUR SALES PITCH, MAKE IT EXCITING
Once you’re confident that you’ve connected with the right point of contact, you need to have an effective sales pitch. One that captures the attention of your prospect and keeps the conversation moving in the right direction. Spend too much time talking about your company, the benefits of your solution, the clients you’ve worked with, why your prospect should sign up today and you’ll risk ruining the relationship straight out of the gates.When it comes to delivering an effective pitch, it’s more about showing your expertise—not just rattling off the highlight reel of numbers and clients you’ve worked with.
7.LISTEN TO WHAT YOUR PROSPECTS ARE TELLING YOU
By building your sales strategy around listening carefully to (and recording) the most common objections, feature requests, competitor software in use, and other key bits of information, you’ll be able to perfect your approach and gradually increase your close rate.One of the most important aspects of selling or even going into business for yourself is being flexible. Listening to feedback from your prospects, watching the data and making changes as needed. Sometimes having a rigid plan can limit you.
8.GIVE YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION TO SALES CALLS
Whether you’re making a cold call or following back up with one of your sales leads, it’s important to treat the call at hand as the most important thing you could possibly be doing at the moment. If you’re not engaging with your prospect, expressing interest while they’re talking, or asking them questions that show your breadth of understanding, they’ll be able to see through your lack of attention.Giving undivided attention to your calls, especially if your sales strategy relies heavily upon following a script, means that you also need to free yourself up to listen to your prospect.
9.HIGHLIGHT RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Many salespeople tend to focus the majority of their conversations with prospects around highlighting all of the potentially amazing opportunities, benefits, and quick results the prospect will get from using their solution.Rather than presenting your solution as the sole solution to your prospect’s “problem,” be honest with them about any risks associated with making the switch to your platform or venturing into this new strategy.The reality is that there’s no opportunity without some measure of risk in business, so why try and paint a reality that isn’t true for your prospects? That’s setting yourself up for failure.
10.BE HELPFUL
At the end of the day, if your sales strategy isn’t built around being genuinely helpful to your prospects, you’ll leave a lot of deals on the table. Being helpful throughout your sales process, whether through education, researching your prospect’s challenges ahead of time, or coming up with creative solutions to present rather than simply pitching your product, is how you’ll win their trust.
Watching your business grow over time is one of the most rewarding aspects of being an entrepreneur, and you can’t do that without a sales process. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the day-to-day of building a product, raising money, and growing your team. You take for granted that sales will happen, but actually, it takes a lot of effort and strategy to close deals.
