E188: Why Sales People Think They are Following a Sales Process — But Really Aren't (And How to Fix It)

In this episode, we're going to unpack why most sales teams say they follow a process, but actually don't, and then how you can go about fixing it. Welcome to Sales Growth Made Simple, the show helping 7 to 8 figure trade, construction and industry sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host, Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years. In today's episode, we are going to unpack the myth from sales and business leaders where they say, yes, we follow a sales process. I'm going to share my experience as to why very few businesses that I work with actually do and give you some ideas around how you can go about fixing it. I've been consulting through to sales teams informally for over 10 years. And of course I've had my own businesses across the last 25 years, but I've had a really razor-sharp focus on doing this for about 5 years now. And in 5 years, wow, I've certainly made a lot of ground in my abilities to teach and grow businesses that I can actually pair with my real-world experience of having grown a number of businesses myself. And, and one in particular comes to mind where we won some fast-growth company awards here in Australia for terrific growth. We doubled or more across a 6 or 7 year period up until the point when we sold out to a really large Australian energy retailer. So have certainly been on both sides of the fence across the last 25 years or through to my ripe old age now of 43. And across that time, I have had so much exposure to businesses and sales processes. And I think today what I'm going to zero in on is my experience with businesses who say they have a sales process. So I want you to think of a scenario. I walk into a first meeting with a business. One of my first questions is, what are you looking to achieve? What are you wanting to make happen? And very often I hear a business say, we think we've got— in fact, not very often, almost all the time I'll hear a business say, we've got good processes. We've written down our sales process. We know everyone knows what they need to do, but we just want to try and improve their skills. And so often my next question will be, tell me about your sales process. The response from there generally goes something like this. We get leads in, we contact them, we then have a site visit, we go out, we meet with the customer, we give them a quote, we'll handle objections, and then we'll close about 20% of our deals or 30% of our deals or 25%, whatever the number is. I'll go, okay, great. That's a broad framework, but tell me more. And from there, what gets really hard for most business owners or sales leaders is for them to break that process down into further steps. But what often comes from them is, yeah, look, everyone's on the same page. We're all experienced and we all know what we're doing. And my response to that is, okay, so do we have the majority of your team doing the majority of the same thing the majority of the time? And the savvy sales and business leaders, then the light bulb goes off and they're like, oh, okay, all right, let's get into this. Others will say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. And then I'll follow that with, okay, well tell me how. And look, I won't keep going, but from there it gets really hard to get granular detail out of business owners and sales leaders. And I think what I'm trying to say here is the majority of businesses think they have a sales process. And it's certainly not a thought that is from trying to hide things or cover up or that they're, you know, being completely overconfident. But it's more a case that they probably did one day in the early days. They probably did spend some time years ago into their sales process, or they naturally have done it so many times that they think that their sales process just occurs. The reality for these businesses is the whether it's one person selling or a team, is that they don't have a sales process. And the result that comes from this is quite a significant deviation in how they run their sales calls with their customers. And what I mean by a significant deviation is that when they meet with customers on site, there's very rarely a process that says, okay, this is the first thing I do when I get to site, then this is where we go to from here, right? And this is how we close out. The on-site visit. Or when we quote, this is the first and most important part of pulling our quote together. This is then what we need to make sure from a data point of view we get. This is how we round the quote together from a very specific task level, i.e., what we do on page 1, what we do on page 2, what we do on page 3. For many businesses, there is only one page. And then from there, okay, this is how we deliver the quote to the customer. These are our non-negotiables. These are the questions that we ask when we're presenting our quote. This is how we follow up with the customer. This is how many times we need to make phone calls to them. This is what we do when things are not going our way. Now for most of these businesses and leaders, they have ideas around this, but they tend to follow their nose or follow the customer lead rather than stick to their process. Now what they should be doing, in my experience across many hundreds into a thousand-odd salespeople, is that they should be looking at the key activities So not writing scripts. I think it's really important to really differentiate here. This is not about having everything written down. We create robots, right? We could just go and get an AI agent if that's what we wanted. But what they should be doing is having the key steps of their process written down so that they can follow it the majority of the time. The reason is generally when you're writing this process down, you're going to be writing down your best process. You're going to be thinking about deals that you closed that got exceptional results. Or times when you know that you're going to get a yes, or the types of customers that you should be selling to, or the scenarios where you're going to quote a type of product versus a different product. How you're going to present quotes to customers, when you're going to present quotes to customers, how you're going to talk them through potential objections before they come up. The best objection handlers I've ever known are the ones who don't get any because they'll get very few because they handle them so early in the process. So a good process, or in fact I should say an actual sales process existing, is all based on taking what you do really well and trying to replicate it as often as possible. And certainly with the teams that we're working with, we will document a one-page sales process with every single one of them. And by documenting that process, we're making sure that they are following the rules or following what works as much as they can and putting them in a position to get a yes more often than not. So most sales or business leaders in my experience, and I've had plenty of it, think they have a sales process, but generally just follow their nose from an accrued level of skill they've built up over the last period of time. Whereas those that are really successful are building out an actual sales process to make sure it delivers. So the question I think for today is, what can you do about it? If you don't have a sales process, or you think you have one, but you want to test it if it's the right one or not, what can you actually do about it? Thankfully, there's a really tried and tested way that we use that works here, right? And it involves bringing together any key people in your business who are part of the sales process. If you're doing the sales on your own, which a huge number of people we work with are, if you're doing the sales on your own, then you either do it yourself or you get someone to help you do it. Either way is completely fine as long as you get the result of a process written down. Sometimes I will say having someone who's done it before help you through it can save you a lot of time, a lot of heartache. And get you a better result. Because if you get a process that works 5% better, the numbers and the sales that you close from that over time dwarf generally the cost to get someone involved. But you can certainly do it yourself as well. But the idea here and the way that it works is to sit down and document your sales process generally across a key number of areas. We have a resource for this that will help you along. It's at www.strongersalesteams.com/ Sales Process. We'll put that link in the transcript notes so you can click on it if you need to. And what this involves, this process involves, is sitting down and mapping out those stages of exactly what you're doing with the customer. 5 stages is in our resource there. Lead generation, meet and greet, quote, close, and then the post-sale piece. But they'll sit down and they'll map out the key activities across each of those stages. Generally, we're talking about between 15 and 40 steps. All right, and from there, what we see great businesses, great sales leaders do is they actually have a process that's written down. They'll print it out, they'll laminate it, they'll do whatever they need to do. They'll have digital versions, but it actually steps through what they should be doing at each of these stages. The beauty is you often don't need to memorize all of this because in most instances you'll step through those stages across different meetings or different times. So you can simply use it as a refresher to get your team or yourself performing well. And look, from there, a whole lot of fantastic things happen. Things like being able to find out where the gaps exist, looking at areas that you're doing well but want to really improve on, bringing your team together to align so you have less wastage. If you're leading a team, it's a lot easier to manage people because you don't have so many different people doing so many different things, but huge amounts of benefits that come from that. And I think that's the main message for me today is if you think you have a sales process, pressure test it by writing it down. And if you can't do that, grab a sheet of paper, grab that resource I explained to you about. It's free. It doesn't cost you anything. Go and get it. Use it to build out your sales process and then start to use it in each of your meetings, in your day-to-day sales activities. Use it as a reminder, as a cheat sheet. We all have things we refer to really regularly. If you're into health and fitness, you'll have a training program. I know when I go swimming, there's no way I can remember my full swim set most of the time. I have to write it down or, or even better, I go to a squad where I don't have to think about it and it's written on a board in front of me. Right? Particularly after a few Ks, you start to struggle to remember it. The point is having prompters is perfectly reasonable. And in fact, I'd say best practice for so many businesses around the world. So that's it for today. We've spoken about how most businesses think they have a sales process when in reality, what I see is the majority of them actually winging it and why it's so important to build a process out. Because if you can make 2, 3, 4, 5, even 10% difference to your performance on site, but do that again and again and again over quotes across weeks and months and years, then the positive impact it has on your business is just ginormous. So from today, the key takeaway is I want you to please go and have a think about your process. Do you have one? If you don't, download the resource and make it happen. We're dropping episodes every Monday and Wednesday and Friday. Focusing very much like today on progress over perfection and being just that 1% better. That's it for today. Look forward to seeing you next time. Bye for now. Are you frustrated spending hours of wasted time on sales quotes that you keep losing? Without changing something now, you'll continue to get these same stressful results over and over again. My free quote audit will pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs and what you need to do to increase your close rates quickly. Click the free quote audit link in the show notes to get started now.