How do you go about Building a Sales Process?

I suspect that most people develop a sales process without ever giving much thought to the actual process.  They start doing activities, see what works and develop it from there.  This is fine if you are working on your own but starts to be problematic if a whole sales team does it.  The team ends up doing different activities, which can be confusing for everyone else who works with them.  They frequently re-invent processes, both good and bad, and so waste time.  It is confusing for your customers as well as they will observe different activities without necessarily understanding their value.

As your sales team grows, it is worth investing time in developing a consistent and logical sales process that ensures the team is consistent and only spends their time on relevant activities.  Even if you have been working together for some time, it is worth re-evaluating your process to see what improvements can be made. 

This is how you can understand your current sales process and develop improvements

  1. Brainstorm all the activities without ordering them to start with;

  2. Once you have a long list of activities, group them into defined stages, for example, suspect, prospect, opportunity and sale;

  3. Use examples of good and bad sales to determine what activities are worth doing and which are less effective;

  4. If possible, interview friendly buyers to try to understand the process from their perspective;

  5. Using a generic sales process and what you actually do, build a process that replicates the best activities;

  6. Review with the whole team to look for gaps or inconsistencies;

  7. Continue to refine and adjust as new sales are made.

The simplest 4 stage sales process into which you should categorise each of the activities is:

  1. Suspect – what do you do to create an idea of an opportunity?

  2. Prospect – what do you do to validate the opportunity?

  3. Opportunity – how do you present the proposal to the customer?

  4. Sale – how do you handle negotiations and closing?

Define what a good opportunity looks like and parameterise it.  This can then be used to determine how and opportunity moves from one stage to the next.  It can also be used to track progress and measure performance as you can track how long an opportunity has stayed at each stage.