Sales rarely happen without many things taking place on both the buyer’s and seller’s side.

Most of the research in the domain of sales indicates that there is usually a series of repeatable behaviours that occur each time a sale is won (or lost). This suggests that if one could become more aware of those steps, then it would be easier to sell.

I am suggesting here that if you are selling any kind of IT solution without some kind of process or awareness into how your buyers are buying for you, then you’re not truly a sales professional. Instead, you are merely an order taker. There’s a big difference between those two kinds of salespeople.

The point of having a sales process is so that organizations can mitigate revenue risks and have a more systematic approach to revenue creation. The effect is a better understanding of when and why sales could close. This is often referred to a ‘revenue reliability’.

Simply put, a sales process is a series of repeatable steps and behaviours that marketing and sales people do to move a sales opportunity forward or disqualify it completely.

Typically those steps would include, but not be limited to something like the following:

Lead -> Prospect -> Opportunity -> Evaluating -> Negotiation -> Win or Loss

Some of the better known software as a service offerings include A key element of a sales process in my opinion is the focussed use of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. There are MANY reasons why organizations should use a CRM tool like Salesforce.com and Entellium, not the least of which is to track and manage a sales process..

Having sold, implemented or participated in designing sales processes for Salesforce.com and others, I can say without hesitation that the benefits were nearly immediate.

If your organization doesn’t have a sales process or you are considering joining one that doesn’t, I can almost guarantee a frustrating relationship between you and management. Even a simple sales process with key criteria for each step is better than nothing.

There are many good off-the shelf sales processes in the marketplace. Some of the better, more well known ones include: CustomerCentric Systems, Solution Selling and Miller Heiman to name just a few.

There’s an adage which states, “If you don’t know how you got where you’re at, you’re still lost.”

The same is true about being in this fantastic profession of sales without a sales process. So the next time someone asks you about your sales process, make sure you have an answer.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Marketing, Sales Managers, Sales Reps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.