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Sales Process
Sales Process
Sales Process
Presented by:
Dr. Mohit Pahwa
Assistant Professor, School of Law, NMIMS, Chandigarh
Campus
Ph.D. from IIT, Roorkee
The sales process – also known as a sales cycle – is the method your
company follows to sell your product or service to customers. It
involves a series of steps, from initial contact with a lead to the final
sale.
These are some benefits of building a sales process for your business:
• You can optimize the structure of your sales team to support the sales process and identify the main challenges in the
sales cycle.
• It helps you identify short-term and long-term goals and how each step in the sales process supports the next one.
• It highlights where time and resources are being wasted, so you can remove activities with low return on investment
• It identifies the steps that need to be improved. This allows you to invest in training, education, and practice to get
better in areas of weakness, which will help match your success in other parts of the sales process.
The first step is to prospect for customers, which requires some research. This stage has three components.
1. Create an ideal customer profile (ICP). The goal is to identify and understand your ideal customers. This
helps you determine whom to contact and why you are contacting them as potential customers. The ICP
uses real data to create a fictional characterization of a client who:
• Can provide your company with value (e.g., revenue, influence)
• Your company can provide value to (e.g., return on investment, better service)
2. Identify potential leads. Use the ICP to create a list of potential leads that fit this profile. Use a variety of
sources (e.g., online databases, social media) to develop a list of ideal client companies. Then create a list
of prospects from these companies that your sales team can contact and qualify.
• Determine the best way to contact the prospect (e.g., telephone, email, social
media).
• Reach out to the prospect. Make sure you are prepared (e.g., with a script,
introduction and questions) before making contact. Introduce yourself and
work on building trust, not making a sale.
• To qualify the prospect, learn more about them. Ask about their goals, budget, challenges
and other issues that will help you to make your decision. Make sure that the person you
are speaking with has the power to make decisions on doing business with you. When
speaking with the prospect, identify opportunities to provide value.
• Qualifying the prospect involves confirming whether they meet the criteria of a good
customer. If they are not a good fit, tell the prospect why. If they are still interested,
determine why.
4. Nurture prospects.
Once you have qualified the prospect, demonstrate the relevance of your
solution to them. This typically involves answering questions about your
unique offer, the benefits you provide, and the problems you solve.
When answering the prospect’s questions and learning about their needs,
you have to nurture them along the process of making a decision. This
involves:
In stages three and four, the prospect might be ready to buy because
they need a solution immediately. In this case, move to the next
stage.
• While the content of your offer is very important, how you present the offer can be
the difference between success and failure. Consider your audience and the
situation when deciding how to present your offer. Creativity can be very effective,
but you should also focus on what works best for you given the experience of
previous presentations.
If the prospect still responds with “not yet” or “not now” for
reasons beyond your control (or theirs), then return the prospect
to the nurturing stage. Stay in touch and follow up with
prospects who are not ready to purchase.
Build a sales process to help your salespeople find the answer to the key question.
Conduct interviews with buyers and salespeople and perform industry research to find
the answers to include in the process.
Set milestones.
Once you’ve defined the stages of your sales process, establish the key steps and
milestones within those stages. A milestone could be identifying where the buyer is in
the sales process or engaging with stakeholders within a certain time period. Score each
milestone to determine how many resources to invest into that part of the sales process.
When you set a milestone for each stage, train salespeople to meet that milestone at the
assigned stage. This will prevent them from skipping steps or taking the wrong approach
at the wrong time (such as talking about the price too soon). Instructing salespeople on
when and how to do handoffs will also help correct problems in the sales process. This
simplifies the process of helping buyers move from one stage to the next.
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