Are you a senior leader at an organization where you just know your current sales process could be a lot better?
If so, you’re not alone.
I’ve been working for years with organizations to help them develop a custom sales process specific to what their salespeople are doing on the ground. Typically, companies come to me when they’re facing a few key issues.
First, their sales reps are all selling in different ways, with varied results.
Second, they’re frustrated by the canned sales training methodologies out there, which simply don’t fit into the world of their offering and their reps.
And third, their sales close rates aren’t where they should be given the quality of their product or service.
Do any of these issues ring true for you? In this short video, I’m going to walk you through the 5 key steps I take to create a custom sales process that can solve these issues for your organization. Check it out:
Video Summary:
Custom Sales Process Step #1:Identify the core value proposition.
This might sound overly simple, but many organizations miss the boat on this. What do your reps say when a prospect asks, “Why should I do business with you?”
Do your reps have a consistent way of answering this question? I’m not talking about what you have written on your website or what jargon your marketing team uses. I’m talking about the words your sales reps actually say when asked, “Why should I do business with you?”
The first part of building a custom sales process is identifying the core value proposition of your company, which will form the basis of the answer to this question. Of course, it isn’t an easy question to answer because you have to say something that’s unique from what everyone else out there is saying.
You must identify exactly what value your organization brings to clients, and then say it in a way that’s not cheesy or salesy such as, “We have the best service and people love us! We’ve been around for 200 years!” Every single organization is saying stuff like that. You need to get to the heart of what value you bring and make yourself stand out.
Identifying this is so key because the rest of your custom sales process builds on that basic core value proposition.
Custom Sales Process Step #2: Map out the best practices of sales top performers.
When organizations come to me, they often say, “We really want to bring in a new sales process.” They’re usually looking for solutions outside of their own company. But oftentimes some of the best sales process ideas are actually already happening within the organization.
My firm takes the step of assessing exactly what top sales performers in your organization are doing today that’s working well—compared to what your average reps are doing. (If you’re an individual-producing rep, you can do this on your own by identifying the top performers on your team and then trying to model what they’re doing.)
On a broader scale, we break down the science behind what top performers are doing on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Then we build the framework of the custom sales process around those best practices. Mapping out the best practices of sales top performers is critical because top performers often don’t even know what they’re doing right. It can be hard for them to articulate why they are successful—just like it’s hard for top athletes to explain how they’re so good at hitting the ball or making free-throws.
That’s why we map out exactly what they’re doing, step by step, during this phase of custom sales process development.
Custom Sales Process Step #3: Script out sales tactics and strategies.
It’s amazing how much pushback we get from individual salespeople on using scripts. They tend to tell us, “I don’t need a script. I just like to keep it fast and loose and go with the flow.”
But if you look at top performers, they’re not keeping it fast and loose. They’re not going with the flow. Instead, they’re doing the same exact thing over and over again—and it’s working.
At this stage of building out your custom sales process, it’s time to script out exactly what those repeatable sales tactics and strategies look like. That way, when you bring a new person into your organization or someone is struggling to sell, you can provide them with specific scripts to follow.
Of course no script, no matter how good, can guarantee that all reps in an organization will achieve the same outstanding results as top performers. But scripts can significantly improve what your salespeople are doing and get them all doing the same things on a consistent basis—and that’s what a custom sales process is all about.
Custom Sales Process Step #4: Introduce the methodology to management for “train the trainer.”
When we build custom sales processes for organizations, they’re often really hot to trot—they want to roll out the new sales process immediately and get it out to the masses. But it’s important not to rush when it comes to implementation.
That’s why step number four is introducing the custom sales process to management for what we call the “train the trainer” phase of development. The goal is to get buy-in and also provide training at the sales management level on how to implement the sales tactics.
Let’s face it: most sales managers are still active in the sales process. That’s why it’s important that they’re the first ones to go through the new custom sales process. Not only will it raise their own game, but it will set then up to be the ones who are actually introducing the new sales methodology to the broader sales organization.
Getting buy-in from that middle level of management is so important. I can’t tell you how many times organizations have told me that they tried to roll out a new sales approach, only to have it just sit on a shelf and collect dust. This usually happens because they went straight from developing the new process to bringing it out to their salespeople—skipping the step of training the trainer altogether.
Empower your managers to train your salespeople on the ground floor. Teach them exactly what to do—before you introduce it to anyone else.
Custom Sales Process Step #5: Launch to the broader sales organization with structured modules.
We’re all about creating a structured approach when actually rolling out a custom sales process. It’s important to think about the sales process in a way that’s systematic and allows your organization to present it to reps in a repeatable, consistent way.
Nowadays, with the world of online training, it’s so easy to modularize a simple custom sales process and deliver it to the sales organization. While there will also be a lot of live sales training where managers will introduce different aspects of the sales process, these online sales training modules serve to reinforce the main elements of the sales process—both for existing salespeople and new ones.
This doesn’t have to be some massive undertaking of 300 hours of modules. It just lays out the simple sales process step by step for everyone to easily access and understand. That’s it.
So, there you have it. Now you know the 5 steps to building a custom sales process for your organization. I want to hear from you. What did you find most useful about this guide to building a custom sales process?
And if you’re a senior leader at a sales organization with 100 salespeople, I’d love to do a complimentary sales process audit for you. We’ll have a conversation with you and some folks at your organization to really understand it from a sales process perspective. Simply click on this link and you can register to get a complimentary sales process audit.