How to Build a Sales Process According to Jennifer Terrell

There are many factors that go into building an effective, high-performing sales process. Jennifer Terrell walks you through her method for building predictable and iterative sales processes.

Test for Different Channels

The first factor to consider is whether or not your organization utilizes multiple sales channels. Jennifer Terrell claims that businesses will want to first test which channel is most effective for a particular product or service. Each channel typically requires its own sales processes, so it is imperative to first establish a comprehensive overview.

Start with a Single Channel

Jennifer Terrell recommends taking a ‘one bite at a time’ approach, by identifying the channel that has an increased chance of being high-performing for a given product or service.

From there, you can construct your sales process for that particular channel and obtain measurable results. Moving forward, you can iterate and improve on this process based on the data collected. By doing this, you may find that this particular channel has excellent incremental gains and increase focus on one channel until it has been fully optimized.

Expanding to a Secondary Channel

Once your first channel has a fully optimized sales process, you can expand to a secondary or tertiary channel. You can then follow the same iteration process to maximize your gains for each channel. If one of your channels is not outbound, you will need to find ways to make sure you are getting a feedback loop from your customers to continually improve your sales process.

Building the Sales Process

According to Jennifer Terrell, every component of a sales process should be engineered, from sales copy to sales collateral.

Without a defined structure, you will have too many variables at play, which will lead to difficulty iterating and improving. A systematic approach to a sales process can be not just improved but recreated indefinitely so that all of your future sales have a higher success rate.

Many executives may disagree with this philosophy. However, creating a definitive customer path helps to guide your client more easily through the decision-making process in a predictable way.

The Bottom Line

According to Jennifer Terrell, the benefit of a systematic sales approach is having the ability to dissect individual pieces at a time. If a certain part of the process is not yielding the results you want, it is easier to understand what does not work and iterate from there, without changing every single aspect of the sales process.

This way, there is no need to overwhelm your sales team by simply telling them to ‘get better’ or ‘figure it out’ when something goes wrong. The very best salespeople, according to Jennifer Terrell, always follow a defined, step-by-step process.