Rethink Your Sales Process

Startups who are raising capital need to show traction in a market, what their current growth rate is and what steps are in place to grow or accelerate it.

Let us assume the following:

You have established your go-to-market fit and believe your market research has delivered the necessary results to continue with Sales expansion.

Your Customer Development efforts have given you key learnings about the validation of your product to market participants. Customer feedback has provided you with information to map the Buyers Journey and create different hypothetical Sales sequences to start experimenting with.

You have marketing collateral that will introduce your product to the required market segments which will get them to view your product / phone /or click /or fill in their details.

If you are a multi-sided platform that needs both B2B customers and B2C customers, prioritising which efforts will lead to the fastest results becomes crucial and figuring it out happens through continuous experimentation, hustling, and meeting with businesses. Getting them to buy and not only pay lip service, might be more difficult than you thought.

Your zigzagging efforts , to find the sweet spot between demand and supply , might take longer than anticipated. If you are lucky, operational efforts are now starting to take time away from the founder’s focus on new business development. What are your options to ignite and grow?

Hire a VP of Sales? Sales Manager ? Junior / Field Sales team ?

This is very much dependant on the type of business you have, and how far advanced you are in the business lifecycle. If you have a Sales is a self-service Sales function, you might be looking at marketing to create PPC campaigns to drive more Leads to your Inside Sales team.

If your business needs a Salesperson’s touch to close the loop, what activities will lead to an (ideally) scalable output? How is that ‘touch’/activity handled by a Salesperson? And what are the ideal end-results? How is that communicated back to whom… to make the necessary adjustments.

What is the thinking and rationale behind the behaviour that is needed from a Salesperson? Most people will revert back to what they know/or think Sales should look like.

Are CEO/Founder’s understanding of what moves people to act/buy/download/return always sufficient enough?– based on what they read in the 101 of Sales?

I recently saw the negative effects of month-end promotions on Sales behaviour ; it reinforced the image of pushy Sales people and realised it is still the Achilles heel of shortsighted managers who are pressured to make the number but employ inefficient processes and incentives.

How do we correct this?

Management philosophies like Lean Manufacturing and the Theory of Constraints, and the evolution of manufacturing’s high-speed automated production lines, have lead to a workflow analysis of the Sales Process — to dissect jobs that can be specialised, improved and automated.

“LEAN is centred on making obvious what adds value by reducing everything else.”

Sales Process Engineering will lead you to structure your Sales functions in an efficient , analytical , activity driven format that aligns with the buyer’s journey, and is scalable. It also helps focus your Sales team, which is many times the single most difficult thing for them to do.

This can be a very simple or a very complex process, depending on your product or service.

If you are in the B2B space where buyer behaviour have been standardised through corporate process implementation, ie, Procurement departments, or multi-level decision-making systems…Your mapping process might be more straight forward but might need different emphasis points.

When you do have the right Sales Process in place you can dramatically improve the ‘throughput’ — rate at which the Salespeople effectively interact with customers at a point where their cadence increase — See TOC.

Repetition is key!

Athletes’ have training programmes. Coaches exist to help measure performance-enhancing activities. Sales Managers can do the same with sales activities — as the data should start telling a story which leads to better learnings of how to optimise techniques, and improve areas in which there are still gaps.

Outlined below are some questions and tips to evaluate your current Sales Process :

· Make a list of ALL the Sales team’s activities — including menial ones like driving time to a customer if they are Field Sales.

· Which business units are involved directly and indirectly with Sales?

• What is their involvement? Is it adding value?

· Where is time wasted?

· Which area is not delivering results?

· What is /isn’t driving the right behaviour?

· Which area/activity should be, and is currently not measurable?

· Where are grey areas in the current process, and why is that?

Let me know what you think, or contact me for a chat.

I help companies grow their businesses through:

• Sales Strategy Development
• Customer Development
• Sales Process Development
• Sales Enablement
• Sales Execution