Episode 1: The Sales Process: Game Plan

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management. And to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome to 2023. We hope you're refreshed and ready to hit the year ahead with some serious energy. Personally, I don't know if it's the normal new year hype, much like I get from my football team at the start of every season, or the excitement at coming out of two really tough years that has me all wound up and ready to start the year with a bang. Probably also helps me that where I am right now is pretty warm and it's just that little bit easier to get up, keep fit and hit each day with a mindset that I need to perform. But let's get into it. New Year, new planning cycle. For many companies globally, it's that time of year where we Review the last 12 months results or so and sit down to see exactly how we can right the wrongs, the stuff that's worked, the stuff that hasn't, or continue to execute the plans that we put into place or even capitalise on the opportunities that are waiting for us on the journey ahead. So with that in mind, today we're going to talk about how to design a sales process. So how to design a real sales process that your team will follow. For me, an effective sales process is one that has everyone on board, they're engaged, and it's really easy to follow, it's measurable, but our teams are willing to stick to it to ensure that customers are well looked after. So, spoiler alert, the next series of podcasts. Over the next four to six weeks, they're all going to deep dive into each of the sales process steps that we identify today. So don't be concerned if you feel you need a little bit more information. I promise it's coming with each of the episodes that we roll out over this period of time. Today is all about a top line introduction To a sales process and how you can go about creating one that's practical, gives your team some structure and allows them to work together. So the sales process, it's the game plan or it's the structure that we build out for our teams to help us not only beat our competitors, but do so in a manner that maximizes our time, energy and most importantly, it makes promises that our business can keep. For me, there's nothing worse than a sales process that teams don't follow. It's gotta be simple, it's gotta be really well understood. Because done poorly, what we end up having is a sales team of individuals who despite the best efforts of leaders and themselves. Right? Because often it's not about intent, but despite these best efforts, it ends up causing us as leaders, all types of lost hours, stress. And in the end you invariably do get people turnover as well because they just simply can't engage with a common vision. Done well, we have a very powerful understanding between our teams as to how we work. This results for me in really consistent performance. Definitely higher conversions, faster sales, and yeah, you bet ya, more engaged team members. A sales methodology, on the other hand, is the approach we take to implementing our sales process. So this is essentially our philosophy. So for example, it's a defense first approach that we build into our game plan, which we also call our sales process. And it actually is a philosophy that, that allows us to have structures and programs built based upon. So in business terms, it's the strategic skill set that we're going to use to move a customer through our sales process. So that's through our process from a lead to a quoted opportunity and then to a customer, examples of sales methodologies. And there's heaps and heaps of them out there are things like spin solution and even, and it's quite popular now, the challenger methodologies, that's really popular in the IT and tech space. So on their own, both sales processes and sales methodologies are important. For me though, the truly high performing teams that I've worked with know the power and the role of both. Okay, so let's talk sales processes. Most of the salespeople I've worked with over my time have been trained in forms of sales methodologies. And I often see organizations utilize multiple methodologies for their single sales process. Particularly as the best salespeople, they tend to have their own strategic selling method, right? So they know what their philosophies are, they know how they're going to work with customers or sets of customers. But the important part, the area that they need help on is keeping them focused on the straight and narrow and avoiding the path to mediocrity that some of the hardest working but underperforming salespeople I've met tend to follow. So over the course of this year, I'm going to provide lots and lots of literature around sales processes, sales methodologies, or really practical ways that we can bring structure into how we run our teams. But for now, the bit that I'd love you to remember is a sales process is the plan. A methodology is the philosophy about how we go about it. Right? So we're gonna talk about the plan, the structure, and the sales process today. So let's swing into action creating that awesome sales process that everyone's gonna follow, but more importantly, provides value for your customers. So for this, and I like to keep all of my practical structural advice really simple, we're gonna use the evergreen game of baseball to help guide us through the process. Love using analogies for teams or leaders. It brings in another learning style. Right? We've got some people who like to listen. They learn by listening, others learn by reading. Lots of people learn by doing. And quite importantly, a lot of people learn by teaching. But using this analogy of the baseball style analogy will also bring those people who like to learn by looking. Right? The visual learner. Okay, so in my 20 plus years, I'm just over 20 years as a sales professional and most of this time has been leading and managing teams. I've seen sales processes vary from anywhere from, say, five to nine steps. Today we're going to work off five and then expand it out if needed. For your business, Right. It's really important to start as simply as we possibly can because that just makes it so much easier for teams to follow. Of course, we can complicate it if we need to, but for me, let's keep it simple. So I've always said Salespeople, they're the CEOs of their own patches. They're the managing directors of their land, right? They're the general managers of everything they control within their area. We want them to own the sales process. So let's make it easy to follow and get them involved. Right? So if you're multitasking now is when you want to come back to me and write down these steps. So the first step of our sales process today is lead generation. We are at home plate, bat in hand. It's, it's that part of the sales process that rightly or wrongly, salespeople love their marketing teams to deliver for them. But the best sales professionals I've ever seen are able to do it for themselves. So quite literally, those who can feed themselves are never out of a job. Really important that in the lead generation part of the sales process, you are defining the difference between a company generated and a salesperson generated lead. Setting targets, making it really clear who's responsible for what. The most common balance I see is 50. 50. Okay, so the lead's in the door and we've got a customer who's somewhere from mildly aware of our beautiful brand and logo right through to absolutely hot to trot to sink their teeth into our offering. We've connected with the ball, we've reached first base and we've generated that lead. Now it's time to head to second base. And that's for the most important meet, greet and needs analysis phase where all of our salespeople, they're meeting face to face or virtually via video and phone. Right? Things have definitely changed over the last few years. Face to face was absolutely king, but now video calls are clearly becoming pretty prevalent and that has all types of pros and cons that we'll speak about over the course of the year. But the meet and greet and needs analysis part of the process is where first impressions are truly a big deal. So important that we're making great first impressions, but also as is qualifying our fit to the customer and listening to what they really need, or more importantly, what's their problem to solve. It's just critical to ensuring that the team hits a home run in the meet and greet and needs analysis phase to set us up for success down the track. The best teams I've worked with know how to set the process up here. Who will make the decision, when will the decision be made, what's important to them in their process and how can we nail it with them? All right, and again, we're going to go through a lot of these in detail over the next few weeks. I'm going to give you lots of steps and ideas that you can use to build a really great sales process. So moving along, we've engaged some help from others in the organization. So we've had our meet, greet and needs analysis and we've gone out to the rest of the business and said, right, we need to prepare our quotation or our proposal or our offer. Right, which is the third base and I call it the presentation step. So we're putting forward what we think will work for our customer's journey. Again, either face to face virtually or video call or look heaven forbid and I call it an absolute doom loop of a communication method email. Fine when you're dealing with low value transactional sales, but when we're Talking about real B2B selling, where you're really in a competitive market and need to be outperforming others emails, the method is just absolutely past those most effective salespeople that I work with hang out for episode four around this. So that'll be towards the end of the month and we'll jump into nailing the presentation more. Okay, so bases are loaded, the organization's aligned and whack, home runs hit. Right. The close is made, the glory, the excitement and that part where we really do gain approval to move forward and as we rightly should, celebrate the win. All right. Of course, I've seen so many times before dealers closed, customers move straight through the process into operations. Salespeople move on to the next deal. Right. Or other accounts that we need to get really heavily involved with. Not necessarily a bad thing depending on the industry you're in, but certainly there's some merit in stopping at this point which we'll go through in the last bit of the sales process which will be post sale management. But the flip side here is teams that can't close, those that spend so much time in lead generation meet and greet and needs analysis and the presentation stage, but when they actually get to the closing, they either lose to competitors. Right. For me, not so bad because you get to actually define where you're winning and losing. But the one that's really, really soul destroying for teams is they lose to inertia. I'm not going to go with anyone else, but I'm just not ready to make a decision yet. Right. So these are the teams that I call the hard working but poor performing sales teams. Having an effective close process that's supported through the wider sales process. It's just critical. You've got to nail it, you've got to get it right. And episode five this year we're going to cover it off in more detail. Okay, so the last step of the sales process and this one I'll say is often overlooked, it's the post close key account management. Right. Or in baseball terms, we'll call it the post game recovery. So whether it's assisting the delivery team or checking in with your customer to make sure they're happy improving our offer or really just doing that post sale review, it's really important that we're doing this process to make sure that not only customers are receiving the promises that they were made, but Also that you've got a great opportunity for referrals and repeat business down the track. Okay, so we got five steps in the process. Number one, lead generation, finding the right fit customer and working out how you're going to generate the leads. Number two, meet and greet and needs analysis, which I haven't said before, but I should say now, is I've grouped both of these together. Often they can be separated out and certainly your business might want to separate them out. But for a lot of B2B selling, the meet and greet is the time when that needs analysis really happens. I like putting them together and really here it's all about focusing on the problems we need to solve for the customer. Third stage presentation, right. This is all about how we're adding real value to the customer. If we are not thinking about the customer and about how we can deliver value to the customer, how we can serve them, then it really comes out in this stage as a very generic offer that really puts us at danger of not winning against our competitors. Fourth step, so we're on third base. It's the close, right? Having that decision made and the agreement from customers to move forward. And the last step is the post sales key account management. Right. Or the post sales account management, depending on what type of work you're in. This is where we're making sure our customers feel they've made the right decision. We make sure their promises are kept by our business and. And we move back to step one of the sales process. Right. Through referrals for the next customer. Okay, so here's the kicker. What else needs to form part of our sales process? I haven't included objection. Handling as an individual stage of our sales process because it really is omnipresent in everything we do. We have to be handling it throughout. It's a really important part of the coaches and players arsenal that we can launch across the game when we need it. Right? So the smoother the first few stances, the more actively that we're handling objections or more proactively that we're handing objections, the less likely we're going to need to dive deeper into it when we get to the closing part of the process. Right. And really difficult when the objections are coming up thick and fast at the closing part of the process because we haven't been able to handle it through the first three or four stages. Right. And that's when things get difficult because we're having to rehash all of the value that we're presenting to a customer. But don't Necessarily have as captive an audience as we did at the start. So in baseball terms, think of it as the basement trying to block your way at every opportunity. Right. We want to get that out of the way really quickly. Last but not least, systems. Absolutely critical part of the sales process and omnipresent in everything we do. For me, this is the uniform that we wear. Right. All being part of one team and all making sure that we're consistently doing the basics. Right. CRM clearly is a very critical part of systems in a sales process. Okay, so how do we create a sales process that our teams will sign up to? Right. Day in, day out, and then on top of that, something that our customer can relate to. So I'm going to flick through some ideas now that have come from my many, many years of building and optimizing these processes. I haven't done this once or twice. I have done this dozens and dozens and dozens of times over the last 20 years. So we're trying to work out how do we get our sales process up and running in our team. My strongest bit of advice is do it together as a team. This isn't a task that you take on yourself as an individual leader or individual contributor. You really want to get your entire team together, and that is everyone who plays a role in executing that sales process. So that'll be salespeople in house or inbound sales, sales coordinators and support people, Even marketing people. Right. Are quite important to get into this part of the process because they can have their contribution. Alignment is the absolute key to having a sales process that people are going to follow. Step two, get that baseball style process that we went through up onto the whiteboard. It gives you a structure to follow. I have no issues with the sales leader defining the 5, 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 even steps of the sales process. That's cool, right? You're just giving a broad based umbrella approach to how we're going to succeed and outperform our competitors. It's the rest of the process, the drilling down parts, that's really important to have your team involved with. So if you want to start with something basic, throw those five steps of the sales process. I do it for every team I work with up onto the board. Right. So get them up. Review it against what you're currently doing. Ask the team for their individual contributions. Right. It's likely the teams aren't all in line, so be prepared for that. But each bit of contribution from your team should go into one of those five steps in the process that we identified earlier. Right. Because at this point in time, there's no such thing as a bad idea. Your job is to group all the ideas together and facilitate a sales process at the end of it that everyone can follow. Right. So essentially you're smoothing out the ideas across the process. At the same time, don't be afraid to car park an idea should the team stray. Really, really common that we'll be talking about a sales process and we'll be talking about implementation. Right. So the post sale key account management and someone in the sales team will want to really drill in hard about how we execute a certain part of the deal that's not really part of our sales process. Right. So put that up on the car park, but just make sure that you commit to your team, that you're going to come back to it. Number four, ideate around what the customer needs. Right? So that's the timings between each stage, what should become part of your standard approach based on what the customer wants and really have a think about what's going to make the process smooth for them. So at this point in time you're flipping from a push strategy, Right? So pushing out what your team thinks is most important into a pull strategy to have a think around what the customer needs. And really it's an exercise where you can just write their goals underneath the sales process that we have set up. At this point in time, you really want to be setting some goals that will become future KPIs, right? So you got a voice here too. It's likely that everyone's collecting different pieces of information and for example, spending different times in needs analysis. So an example here might be having a standard four or five questions that we ask as a company in every single deal that we walk through. Right. Standardizing these and then making sure everyone follows them. Objection. Handling is also likely scaling from proactive to reactive. So can we standardise? Right. How we can have some common questions that will help us proactively handle objections. All right, Number five, agree on the process moving forward. So everyone has to sign up to this. It's so important that we set the metrics for measurement. We make sure everyone's engaged. All right. And that we're all very clear that how we're measuring ourselves over the next 12 months has got everyone's buying. If you want a little bit more help around setting these metrics, have a look out. Over the next six to eight weeks, I'm going to be launching a couple of models. One's called the Teamstep and one's called the three box. Right. Both of these are really simple and effective ways to help you get people on board with what you're doing. They help set benchmarks. And of course, right, when we get benchmarks, it helps us move customers through each of the stages in the sales process. But again, I'll say it's really important. The simpler you keep the sales process, the more likely it's going to be to be followed. Okay, number six, document your sales process. So we've got the team together, we've thrown everything up on the whiteboard, we've reviewed it against what we're doing. We're then ideating exactly around how this works with customer needs. Right before we say, okay, here's our process and we're going to agree on it moving forward. Your job now is to make sure you document it. If we document it or what gets measured gets done, right. We then have something that we can refer back to. We have something that our team can have in front of them as a cheat sheet and we have a record of what we've agreed to. Of course, down the track, I'd suggest you come back probably three months down the track and review this. You might refine it or tweak it and relaunch it. Lastly, and by no means any less important, so point number seven is think about how you can make it omnipresent in everything you do. So for me, this is where elite sales managers really shine. It's taking that sales process, taking particularly the KPIs out of them and embedding them into your one to ones revolving training programs around this sales process, looking at your system, symbols and norms and even your rules of engagement. Right? And we'll talk about these more later down the track in the podcast series. But it's so important that if you can flow very simply and consistently measurement tools and metrics from your sales process into everything you do, right. Then it makes your task as a leader so much easier. Okay, so we've gone through seven steps there, right? I'm going to repeat them again. Seven steps to really nailing the creation of a sales process. Number one, get the team together. Everyone needs to play a part in this. Number two, get up on the board. A broad line structure of a sales process. Right? Use the five steps that we've gone through today. Lead generation, meet and greet needs analysis, Presentation, close and post sale care account management. Right. Then step number three, have a look at what you're currently doing it. Review against how you're currently doing it. Step number Four, ideate around what the customer needs as well, and then we can start sending our goals and our KPIs. Right. Number five, agree on the process moving forward so that everyone's signed up and we've got some clear KPIs. Number six is document it, then come back and review in three months. And number seven is make sure it's omnipresent in everything you do. And of course, through all of this, you're keeping very much a customer lens around what a great sales process looks like for them. In fact, you might even ask some of your really trusted customers to give you some feedback on it. So the above steps, they're a really practical guide to building a great sales process, but I fully recognize and have been through this multiple times with my customers and my clients over the years, is that you might just need a little bit more help implementing. So if you need that, please, you're most welcome to book in a free discovery call with me. And I can help you. Specifically, the easiest way you can get in contact with me is through stronger sales teams, probably on Instagram or LinkedIn. Right. I get across every connection made into the business, so I'd like to hope you'll hear from me directly and then you can get something out of it. All right, so there you have it, folks. That's the game plan. Everything from lead generation through to post acquisition management. Right? Tied together with a beautiful baseball analogy that I hope you can remember and use with your teams. But more than anything, this is chunky, practical advice to help you build that sales process. So if you want to dive a little bit deeper, I'll also have free how to guides that I mentioned before for not only creating a sales process that you can get your teams to actually follow. Right. But also more details on each of the steps. So DM me sales process at stronger sales teams again on LinkedIn or Instagram if you'd like to get more information. Okay, so next up, we're going to move into our series of the five parts of the sales process. The first one is going to be lead generation, and then each step after that. But before I go, I've promised and with everyone that I work with, I have a big focus on making sure that the sales leaders that after time with me, actually come out not only better educated for how to run their teams, but actually better educated about how to look after themselves. Because for me, aspirationally, people love to follow those who are fit, healthy, knowledgeable and really good at what they do. Right. So how can you subtly impact your physical health while you're building a sales process. For me, I love it when the opportunity comes to stand up during a meeting. So take this opportunity, grab the energy, the focus and keep your body moving while you can. Stand up during one of these sessions. So for me, give it a go, right? Grab three colour markers, get a whiteboard and own this meeting. Okay? If you can't be face to face with your team, right, then you'll have to find a way to do it when you're remote. But get that body moving, stand up, burn those calories and you actually inherently are very subtly becoming fitter and healthier from it. So thanks for listening today, everyone. Please share the podcast with anyone you know who might like it. And I'd be super grateful if you left me a review or rated the podcast. I read every review and I'm really working hard to get some great content out. So a little bit of positive motivation, you know, I'm human. It helps me too. Until next time, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our friends? Free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible. Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're onger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.