The sales process is one of the most important parts of your overall sales strategy. The sale process essentially encapsulates all of the “how” the sale will occur and provides the basis for communicating with clients, prospects, and other potential customers. Without a well-developed, optimized sales process, a company’s ability to achieve the success desired in any given market space will be severely hindered. There are many different factors that go into developing a strong and effective sales process. However, two primary driving forces behind the creation of the sales process are understanding and speaking clearly to clients and prospects, as well as providing prospects with a reason to become a client.
The sales process is broken down into five simple steps. These steps are the starting point for the sales process and must be effectively utilized to bring your business from the current level of sales to the next level. The five steps of the sales process include: Introduce your product or service, set your price, develop a marketing plan, contact a prospect, and close a deal. By breaking down each of these steps into its respective sub-steps, you’ll better understand how to efficiently utilize each of them to help your business reach the next level of success.
Introducing your product or service is perhaps the most important element of the sales process. You need to make people feel like they truly have something of value to offer when they come to you for solutions. In order to do this, you must establish a dialogue about what it is that you have to offer. It is important that both you and your potential client/client understand the value that you share, and that your answers to each other should be clear, concise, and easily reproducible.
Once you have provided a dialogue about what you have to offer, it is important that you and your client are on the same page. One of the best ways to do this is to create a shared system. Having a shared system between your prospects, who have come to you looking to solve a problem, and you, the sales professional who has developed the solution, allows you to keep track of all of the pertinent information and communicate from one point to the next with ease. This shared system will provide you with the best way to connect with your prospects and help you effectively close deals.
Developing a marketing plan is another integral part of the sales process. Without a plan in place, you are walking blind into the sales process – and into failure. Without a clearly defined plan, your prospects are not sure where to turn once they realize that you are the solution to their problem. CRM tools such as Salesforce, SharePoint, and Microsoft Dynamics can help you develop a comprehensive marketing plan that will enable you to reach out to and contact your prospects at the appropriate time.
Finally, the last two main components of the sales cycle are equally as important as any of the previous components. These are the development of the proposals, and the execution of those proposals through the sales process. If you want to be successful, you must be able to: develop the proposals you are going to sell to your clients, and then execute those proposals throughout the entire sales cycle.