The magic behind Sales Process success

Well … truth be told, there is no magic in anything … not at work, not in life. But why did I con you by naming this post with the words ‘magic’? Something can 'appear magical', though truly, behind the scenes, lot of work has gone into it meticulously to make it appear so. Your co-salesman might be ‘magically’ appearing to close almost every prospect coming his way. If you asked him, he would lift his collar and say "That’s the magic, dude!" and leave you with more awe. But what is unsaid is a lot more … lot of hardwork he would have put in behind the scenes to make every deal work out, lot of shitty stuff that would have happened under the cover, which no one wants to, or neither would, speak of. So time to create the magic yourself! 

According to this Harvard Business Review article, a whopping 44% of sales executives think that their sales process is poorly managed! The key is to define your sales process really well, and it is well worth spending that initial time to focus on getting it right. 

According to a Harvard Business Review article, a whopping 44% of sales executives think that their sales process is poorly managed

I don’t want to beat the bush by repeating the usual five steps in a sales process (prospecting, connecting, researching, presenting, and closing). Enough has been said and written about this. Instead, let’s focus on each aspect and see how to get the best out of it.

The first step is prospecting. Here are five steps to effective prospecting in your sales process and to get the most out of it :

1. What matters really?

So you have a "Contact Us" form and you have lot of fields in there. But what are the top three fields that matter to you the most ; I mean, what are those top three fields which can land you in better closure of deals? So, write a workflow in Zoho CRM (or whatever your CRM is) to classify those leads differently based on the value of these top three fields. For example, if you own a Home Fitness Solution company, and if married men in their mid-career are your best targets, then you got the top three parameters which matter most to you :

Age

Gender

Marital status

That’s it! Now, you can write your CRM workflow so that it prioritizes these leads over others. So make sure you know how to automate prioritizing your leads so at least the crucial leads are always followed-up meticulously, even though not 100% of them, and so you have a brighter chance to increasing your overall lead conversion rate. 

CRM TipWhat you can do, more smartly, is to have a form / module where you store these crucial parameters and the weightage for these. Then you can write a custom function which will fetch these weightage values and use it to prioritize your Leads / Prospects as they come in.

2.  How do you followup with your Leads?

Now that you have a bunch of leads to follow-up with, how are you going to choose to follow up with them? When does email work? Or should you be calling them to say a nice introductory message, rather? It’s crucial to chart out every little detail of your strategy in approaching the prospect, at least for the very important leads. There are usually certain standards which work for each industry. For example, what usually works for a beauty industry firm may not (and will not!) work for an electronics company.  So you should be knowing what generally works in your industry. However, I would suggest not to stop looking. Something that worked for your competitor may not work for you. So how do you best decide what works for you? The answer is to try and find out. Do some A/B Testing and track the results.

CRM TipWhat kind of follow up is working for you and with what kind of leads? Track that through reports. More on useful report on prospects in the next post.

3. Which salesperson is best at that?

You know your salespeople well. But many times, we tend to have assumptions that need to be confirmed. So the best way is to have very clear, exact systems in place which can measure, say, which of your sales people are best at emailing, who is best when making calls. So these might give you insights into how to followup your Leads better.

CRM TipSee when do the deals close better or come close to it. Is it when Peter makes the phone calls, or when Bob writes emails? More on this in the coming post.

4. Insights from lost deals

As they say, you learn more from failure than from success, try to analyze the lost deals and come up with top three common reasons why you usually lose a deal. Remember that, while celebrating the wins is important, analysing the losses is equally (if not, more) crucial to increasing your conversion rates.

CRM TipTry to see what’s common amongst your lost deals and come up with a plan to address them through automation.

5. Track & Measure & Track & ….

As important as automation is, in order to improve your business efficiency, more important is to track and measure how effective your processes are. Yes, it is simply not enough to put in a process one time, train your sales staff on it and then forget about it altogether. I would not recommend this at all. Markets are dynamic, and you are always constantly learning about your customers’ behavior patterns and refining your own ideas. When everything is so dynamic, how can your sales process not be so? While it is important to have a well-defined sales process, that is why it is all the more important to also keep measuring the effectiveness of the process you have. More on this in the coming posts.

CRM TipHave useful parameters which can show you detailed statistics on how your sales process is faring from time to time. Don’t settle for do-once-user-forever sales process. It might kill you.