Improve Sales Effectiveness with Sales Process Design
The most successful business developers are effective less for who they are and more for what they do.
How, step-by-step, do they go about bringing in new business?
There is no one best sales process. A company may employ different sales processes in different sales scenarios. The ideal sales process in each case depends on a number of unique factors. But all successful sales processes share these best practices characteristics:
- Create value for the customer
- Reflect the customer’s buying process
- Apply to both short-term and longer-term sales pursuits
- Provide Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure success
Companies that adopt this best practices approach to sales process development can improve the average performance of their business developers by as much as 20 percent.
FHG collaborates with its clients to design and implement a sales pursuit framework that: 1) incorporates the best practices of the client’s most successful business developers; 2) reflects the desired buying processes of their customers; and 3) addresses existing flaws or problems by drawing on industry best practices for go-to-market operations.
We begin with an assessment of the customer buying processes. Who's the buyer? Why do they buy? How do they buy? What's the standard sales cycle? To coincide, we also assess our client's existing selling processes, with particular interest in the most effective producers. How do they win? When do they win? How can we win more often? All of this is then viewed through a best practices framework.
At the conclusion of the assessment phase, FHG analyzes for problems, proposes recommendations for improvement, then develops & delivers an optimized workflow map for the sales process. Each optimized process map is accompanied by the relevant success metrics with key performance indicators to track goals.
From this point in the capability building project, we may work with our client to support implementation of the comprehensive sales process.