Bullhorn Live 2014: Unifying Your Sales Process
In his presentation on implementing a unified sales process, Dan Fisher of Menemsha Group gave an easy four-point breakdown of what an effective unified sales process entails. The sales process itself involves analyzing and measuring sales opportunities through a shared language, scalability, repeatability, and management tools focused on optimizing the sales process. Dan’s main tip was that managers should be coaches rather than trainers. Managers must instill confidence in their sales team rather than just teach them a technical sales process.
The four steps to implementing a unified sales process are as follows:
1. Align with customers’ purchasing process
For sales staff, it is important to remember that their success is based on the actions of their customers. If a customer does not buy, then the salesperson is unsuccessful regardless of the amount of effort that they put forth. Therefore, alignment with the customer purchasing process means selling beyond the submittal. By treating customers like people and managing their experience even after the verbal offer, customer churn is reduced.
2. Verifiable and effective criteria for measurement
Often times, sales processes are implemented without any checkpoints in mind. These processes fail due to this set-it-and-forget-it mentality. With any plan, adjustments will be necessary, and if there is no criteria for success or time period for evaluation, then the plan will decline as external conditions change.
3. Sales management system
The use of a sales management system allows managers to measure the effectiveness of their sales processes. Much like verifiable and effective criteria for measurement, this portion of the unified sales process involves the ability to make adjustments as necessary. To identify the sales process’s effectiveness, the sales management system quantifies the goals of the sales management team and provides feedback for improvement.
4. Use of sales playbooks
Sales playbooks are frequently an underappreciated tool of sales team managers. In short, a sales playbook reinforces the sales process for new sales reps and provides a structured guide for managers allowing for a consistent training process across an organization.
Throughout his presentation, Dan repeatedly emphasized that a unified sales process is not hard to implement, it just takes work. Therefore, if you are thinking about implementing a unified sales process, be prepared to put in the time and effort necessary to make it succeed.
This Bullhorn Blog post was written by Samantha McPhall.
