Do You or your company have a defined sales process? One that you can document and articulte to others?

Most people in my sales training or sales consulting can do a lille bit better when defining their sales process. It isno surprise, because there is not much attention generally paid to teacjing salespeople about sales processes in companies.

Very often when there is no sales process in place the salesperson might end up wityh one or more of the following types of  situations by default:

• Prospect Selling: The customer leads the sales process and the salesperson follows.
• Experience selling: This is the process of hoping that past experience will lead to future success.
• Catch-up selling: The competition directs the sale and then you have to play catch up all the time
• Bad sales manager selling: The sales manager enforces the “do it like I did” method.
• Situational selling: The sales person is “winging it and praying” on every call.

If this type of thing happening in your company then there is a huge amount of things you can do to take control of your sales process and dramatically increase your sales effectiveness:

• Spend time understanding your marketplace and why and how people buy. Traditional sales tactics focus on developing the sales approach with very little understanding of why people buy. Don’t fall into that trap and work out what the buying process is.
• Map out graphically the process that most people go through when they buy from you and ask yourself at every point – “How can i ethically and positively influence this step to ensure the sale hapens?”
• Don’t be afraid to put some tough qualification questions in beginning part of your sales process such as “Do you really think ???????? will achieve what you are looking for?”  or “why are you looking at this now?”
• Spend time understanding the motivations of your buyers as well as the process they go through.

Todays top performers in sales spend much of their time understanding how people buy as well as the more traditional ways of selling such as closing techniques and objection handling.