Are your sales teams not consistently following your company’s defined sales process? Is sales performance falling short of expectations? Are forecasts inaccurate, and revenue falling short of expectations? What to do?
Consider a simple ‘Tune Up.’
Step 1: keep it simple. Perhaps your sales process is simply too complex. Complexity is the enemy of adoption. The more complex the sales process, the fewer salespeople that will follow it. Make sure each sales stage provides meaningful insights from initial discovery through validation to closed/won.
Step 2: align your sales process to your buyer’s journey. Provide a simple, objective, check list for your sales teams to adhere to for the entry and exit of each sales stage. Make sure that all selling activities are directly aligned to your expected buyer actions that progress each opportunity through the sales process. Eliminate any sales stage that does not directly align to your buyer’s journey. Establishing a pre-defined set of actions and activities for an opportunity to be in each stage of the sales process will result in improved forecast accuracy and pipeline hygiene.
Step 3: consistently inspect what you expect across your complete sales process. There are four key attributes that need to be validated at each stage in your defined sales process. Managers and sales teams need to ensure rigor and discipline, and a taxonomy of terms, that are consistently applied to each pipeline opportunity. These include:
Step 4: establish a ‘4 Rights’ dashboard for visibility into your sales process. Create a suite of dynamic reports to determine those opportunities that are, and are not, aligned to your sales process. Determine those behaviors and activities that positively or negatively impact the probability for an opportunity being ‘closed/won.’ Continually refine the dashboard so that you can easily determine that your pipeline is populated with the ‘4 Rights’:
Step 5: conduct a semi-annual audit of your sales process. Leverage a semi-annual audit to drive forecast accuracy and revenue performance by conducting a structured, semi-annual audit. Sales processes do age, markets and compelling events evolve, and sales teams often fall into bad habits. Leverage sales process audits to identify those evolving sales activities and buyer actions that have the highest impact on sales success.
If you woudl like to know where to start to improve your sales process, compare your company against over 1,400 companies in the QSS Sales Optimization Benchmark and receive a tactical action plan with defined corrective actions.
