Episode 6: The Sales Process: The Post Game Review

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Who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered B2B sales teams. As we roll into the final episode of our sales process series, it's a great time for me to share a story about my recent experience selling a house. So I bought this house off a real estate agent or a realtor about 10 years ago. So over that 10 year period after the purchase of the house, he spent a considerable amount of time keeping in touch with me. Once or twice a year I'd receive a phone call, how are things going? Whenever I needed some advice, just about generally what's happening in the property market or anything specific about our area or our region, or even some valuations on our house, he was more than happy to provide that to me. So what did that mean when I went to selling my house again the next time? Well, it, it made the decision pretty easy and of course I went out and spoke to a few agents, but I had the depth of relationship here that I didn't have anything close to with anyone else. So for me, I called this a business friendship. He probably called it successful customer management. Perhaps I'm even a key account for him. But it made it so easy for me to make the decision to go with him because of the level of trust that we built up over that 10 year period. So for those wondering, yes, you got my business, yes, we sold the house and we got a price that we're really happy with. But for me, the message in this story is keeping in touch with customers, keeping your relationships going even after a sale has happened is so, so important in building future pipeline for sales. So today we're gonna dive into the fifth and final step of our sales process series, what we call the post game review, or more technically the post sale account. Management or key account management program. We're gonna provide you with some really important things to think think about when leading your team's post sale habits. So please don't underestimate the importance of that word habit. It's without doubt the superpower that I've seen over the last two decades in those that sell who are really, really good at this post sale account management process. Before we get into this fifth and final step, quick check in for those who are new to the podcast and also a nice reminder for everyone else about the five steps that we looked at in episode one of this podcast series. So the five steps to a really effective sales process being lead generation, meet and greet and needs analysis that we rolled in together as one part of the process presentation. Close being the home run and post sale key account management or the post game review that we're talking about today. So let's get into it. Today is going to be focused on four key initiatives that I'd really like you to consider implementing into your team's post sales process. I love it when we can provide checklists and really chunky information, but these four initiatives, they're based off my experiences across hundreds and hundreds of salespeople and teams over the last 20 years and they essentially summarize the best habits, behaviours and systems that I've seen in my time. Okay, first and most important, brand. The company's brand, your salesperson's brand and even your brand are all being put to the test as soon as you receive the agreement to move forward from a customer. Very different to the first four steps of the sales process, where not many expectations really has little impact on a customer. Once you receive their business, the customer is now tied to you for the duration of that implementation and delivery periods, and then also to the useful life of your product or service after that. So if you fail to deliver, so if you don't meet up to their expectations, then it's also their reputations and their money and at times even their livelihoods that are on the line. And I know all of this, it's a little bit somber, right? But it's so important to have ingrained into our team's mind that they own some accountability for delivery, right? This doesn't mean they have to deliver the product, doesn't mean they have to do all the work for the operations or the delivery or the dispatch team, right? But it does mean they have to keep an active interest in what happens after the sale. So my advice is bet into the CRM contact points or bet into whatever program you're using contact points for during the delivery period. Right. So we want to hear salespeople making a call. Let's take a $25,000, 25,000 USD dollar sale, right? And the salesperson's made it to the customer and then they've now done their handover process and it's in the hands of the delivery team. For me, I love to see when salespeople keep in touch. Week one, make sure the process is kicked off just before the delivery process or the implementation process starts, midway of the delivery or implementation process, and then again at the end there. For me, there's four or five touch points in there that makes the salesperson just that little bit accountable to check in, but also really quickly will give us some information if things are going not so well. Right. Cause if they're not going well, you want to know as early as possible as a business, before emotion starts to really rise. I love the saying, what gets measured gets done. You've heard that before. And this is a classic example of a habit that needs some system support to ensure it gets completed. For me, I always like to talk to sales leaders directly about this. Often the post sale follow up is an important but not an urgent task for us as sales leaders. So sometimes we need to continually be reminding ourselves as well of the obligations we have to our customers. Because a great post sale process will lead to referrals, it will lead to a reduction in the number of leads that we need to generate and will make the rest of our job and the jobs of our teams far easier. And above all of that, we'll make sure the customer has a better process than without. So the second initiative is to make sure the flow of information through your business is seamless. There are great arguments to take the process flow away from the sales team immediately. Right? Get them focused on the next deal and what they're good at doing. But the same in reverse. There's some really strong evidence to say that owning the early transfer process, right? So owning the early delivery piece and the communication of information will greatly increase the chances of customer experience. Let's look at when you'd be likely to to roll a salesperson out of contact with a customer quickly versus having them hang around a little bit longer. And I will say before we get into this, that regardless as to whether or not a salesperson rolls out of the delivery process early or late, it's still really important that post completion they're checking in with their customer and following them through for the period of Time afterwards. Okay, so moving on quickly, the argument for having the sale being made contracts in pos, in whatever your form of acceptance is, works really well for simple low value, repetitive sales. So the example here would be everyday machinery like printers, standardised SaaS, software and consumables. Right? Most of these types of sales are very much cookie cutter. You can make the sale and then move on without needing to be concerned about too much complexity in delivery. That said, for this to work, your business needs to have really good systems, really strong transfer of knowledge processes that happen between the sales department and the delivery or the operations department. And even more importantly, if it's not a cookie cutter delivery method, then this approach can really quickly result in a pretty slippery slope for customer satisfaction. So moving on quickly from a sales process, simple, low value, repetitive sales. Staying involved. This is without doubt where I get asked the most questions from sales leaders. When do I keep my salespeople involved until? So typically I'm recommending and have seen very successfully applied across many of the B2B businesses that I've worked with that larger projects, bespoke deals, deals with long sales cycles, or even key account businesses where delivery isn't quite linear and that includes a high profile customer as well is the time when salespeople want to be staying involved just a little bit longer. So the transfer of information is really critical here and it simply can't be underplayed. Right. The best teams that I've seen be successful in bespoke delivery have consistently exhibited some really similar traits. So for those businesses, if you as a sales leader want to be keeping your sales team involved just that little bit longer in terms of delivery, here's the stuff you need to tick off. Number one, data hygiene. This is placed at an absolute premium in this type of project because it's really important that we're not allowing the sales teams to freeform into the delivery phase. So the CRM systems or the other type of software that you have in your business needs to be set up to ensure compliance in handover from the sales team. So this can be things like compulsory fields, measurement of success, ease of use, these type of initiatives are really important to make sure we get the data hygiene right. Second, the number of handovers right between departments is limited. So in a more complex sale where we need to keep salespeople involved, what we don't want to see is deal comes in and goes from sales to delivery, to key the order to finance the invoice, to back to sales to collect the deposit, then over to delivery to execute my strongest recommendation, and I've seen this happen multiple times, where individual functions or departments take over a role and then hand it over. They just result in significant delays in delivery for customers. So for me, you want to be keeping your initial delivery process as streamlined as you possibly can. If you've got a good system that can keep control of your pricing without concerns for rogue or unethical behavior. And I use that really loosely, but we do need to protect ourselves. But if you have good systems that allow your pricing to be pretty well controlled, then having the sales team execute the sale, key the order in, and get the deposit out before handing over to the operations team will often save a lot of frustration. Now, you need to balance out. Whether or not that's going to work for you, particularly for me, is I'd be basing it off how many deals the sales team are doing a month. If they're doing five deals a day, and this is adding 15 minutes per deal, then it's going to become counterproductive. Right. But if they're doing a couple of deals a week or five deals a week, then spending a little bit extra time doing the invoicing and making sure the first part of delivery is seamless is well worthwhile. Okay. Third part is, for me, salespeople need to be really involved in the handover to their delivery departments. This is mostly around CRM briefs and either face to face or video handovers with delivery teams. I think for me is you use emails to confirm and you use face to face phone or video to communicate a message. So I'd be communicating particularly through a kickoff meeting, sales to operations or delivery, exactly how a project was won and the key information and and then using your CRM to make sure that all of this is recorded. Because unfortunately, as humans, we are infinitely fallible and can make mistakes or can forget things. So handover is really important and important not only to have a face to face or equivalent handover, but also to have some written transfer knowledge. The really consistent theme here is that there's responsibility on the salesperson or the technical representative to ensure that the delivery team's brief properly. Next part of this, in terms of what we need to do to make sure that more complex projects are being delivered well, or certainly that the handover process is smooth, is to make sure that it is embedded into the delivery process that customers will receive both ad hoc and automated communication. Why is this important? As a sales leader? As a sales leader, we need to make sure that our sales teams are part of that communication. Flow and are receiving these updates just like a customer when the salesperson is informed, they are far more likely to to work with a customer when they need help rather than be invisible when something goes wrong. Next part project completion signed off by multiple departments. Really important when we've got slightly more complex delivery or operational requirements because it ensures that we have an objective conclusion to the process. A couple more to go in terms of these more complex projects, feedback loops need to be really fast. So when your teams, when your sales teams are involved in ensuring that the delivery process is smooth, generally the feedback loops are pretty quickly. So when we get communication back from a customer, we can then work it into the business and take corrective action. Lastly, for me, my teams have always had an involvement post sale, so regardless of deal size. So I love seeing a balance between effective resourcing and customer satisfaction be worked through between sales and delivery leaders. For me, I've always used a rule of thumb that's based on the number of hours that an average deal takes to close. So look, if you don't know the average number of hours that go into every deal that you close, worth working out because it's a great way to manage your salespeople's time. But let's use an example that if a sale takes 10 hours for one of your people to work through, I generally will allow 20% of that time for project involvement post award. Right. So in this instance it'd be two hours. But for a sale that takes one hour in total, it'll be 12 minutes or we round down to 10 minutes. Right. And so on. There are some limitations to this approach and it doesn't work for every business. But when we're allowing time as part of our sales process to actually be following up, like I said earlier, it's so significant in ensuring the customer's happy. It's so significant in ensuring we're getting referrals which obviously then pulls significant pressure back out of the first phase again or the first part of the sales process being lead generation. We've really jumped into detail in that second trait around effective wholesale account management. The first was about brand making sure that we recognize that brands are on test, not just ours, but also customers brands, and we need to really be accountable for the delivery. The second one is around information flow through the business and understanding when a salesperson will hand over quickly to delivery teams or when they might stay involved for a little bit longer. The third of the traits that I see really commonly evident in great post sale or key account management businesses is that mistakes are fixed. They're not only fixed, but they're fixed quickly. So for me it's really simple. If you make an error in delivery, own it and fix it. Where does the sales team get involved here? Well, they need to be at the coal face when there's a mistake because they have the relationships with the customers. I highly recommend that we don't sweat the small stuff around customer versus supplier causation. Generally, again, the businesses that I see who are able to deliver their commitments and keep their promises and excel in this area, they generally give the benefit of the doubt for small kind of 1 to 3%, even up to 5% of project revenue issues and then work with open and really rapid communication on larger issues. So for me, I've seen projects like serious projects where we've seen serious damage, property damage, lost production time to the customer and significant delays still result in effective long term relationships because the supplier really quickly fixed the issue. So for many business leaders and owners dealing with companies who, whilst they're not perfect, right, but can be relied on to deliver projects thinking of them as the customer. So it's a strategic relationship rather than a transactional relationship. These relationships are really highly valued for sales teams. It's really important that they're at the coal face, which I mentioned a minute ago, when these issues arise, right, they have the relationship. So if a problem comes up, let's get them out there, employ them to work and mitigate any of the concerns or navigate through those that can't be mitigated. It's really difficult to do. Salespeople hate having to front up to a customer when they've got an issue. But so important because they have the power in the relationship to be able to solve these. All right, last but not least, number four is all around meeting with customers when the job is done. So important. If you're in a business model where you're not meeting face to face, then virtual is of course, absolutely fine. The important part here is that we are receiving confirmation with the customer that the job's completed to their satisfaction. So why is this so important? Well, there's a few things that I'd be aiming for in your role as a sales leader. I'd be aiming to get a few things out of these meetings. First one's feedback. What can we do better? What were we really good at? Right. When we can get this feedback straight from the customer's mouth, we can often make consistent and rapid change into our business. Next one's saying thank you. So giving a small gift Being in touch with the customer to say you're important to me really, really critical in building future business, but also making the customer feel good about their purchase. Now, given your deal size or your average sale size, then clearly you need to work out whether or not a gift is appropriate. However, if it's within your budgetary constraints, I'd always recommend something small to say thank you for the customer. Next part around meeting with your customers once the job's done. Asking for referrals. It is the most powerful lead generation tool that we can ever advocate for the best businesses. Again that I see here in asking Referrals have it systemized through their CRMs and they measure success and completion to referral selling. At this point, I'll go back to my analogy at the start of the episode Keeping in touch long into the future. Of course it's industry dependent on whether or not you're revisiting customers for future sales, but keeping in touch regardless if for nothing more than referrals can absolutely pay dividends for salespeople down the track. Okay, so there were four recommendations on really effective post game management or key account management. Right? So number one, brand understanding that not just our brand but our company's brand and our salespeople's brand and even our customers brand is on trial, so we need to be accountable for delivery. Number two, seamless information flow through businesses and understanding when we'd like salespeople to be involved for a significant part or a small part of the delivery versus when we get them to move on quite quickly from once the sale is made. Thirdly, fixing mistakes. Own it, fix it and do it as quickly as you can. And then last but not least, making sure we're meeting with customers in whatever form is most relevantly used for our business, but meeting with customers to make sure that we're checking in that the job's well done. Right? And then super powerful clearly for referrals down the track. Okay, time to take a breath. Wow. Have we covered some information over the last five weeks that has been a jam packed series? Probably one of the more jam packed series of anything that I work with sales leaders on, but very much about how to build a first class sales process that our teams will engage with. I love keeping this podcast really action focused so that my listeners can take chunky and tangible action items. But sometimes we do move pretty fast. So if we have please jump onto the Show Notes to process our recommendations to download the information or or better still, you're very welcome to book a discovery Call with me and I can help you Specifically, best way to get in contact with me is stronger sales team in Instagram or LinkedIn and I do get across all of my connections made into the business, so expect to hear from me directly. For those who do want to dive deeper though, the free how to guide for creating a Sales process is now launched so it's out there. DM me sales process strongest sales team on Instagram or on LinkedIn and I'll get you onto the mailing list and get that out to you. Right. I I love getting a level of information over and above these podcasts outright because I'm here to help you build the best possible sales teams you can. Last but not least on this jump back to episode one. If there's anything you're not certain about, that really is a great spot to be starting off in your creation or reinvention of a sales process. Right, Today's health and Fitness tip We're going to round out the theme around being active while at work today with one that flows from the phrase dress to impress. Although it's not in the manner you'd expect, whilst it's not possible all the time for salespeople who are customer facing to do this. Whenever you get the chance turn up to work in clothing that encourages moving around, it will literally encourage you to move around during the day. And by that I mean a comfortable pair of shoes or a polo top or anything with a little bit of breathability that won't have you sweating after six to eight steps. It's a very small bit of advice that can make all the difference in your mentality. Right? When you are in clothes that you know are a level of or will tolerate a level of active wear, then you just tend to be that little bit more active yourself. Right up next we're looking at sales methodologies, so that's a quick dive into what's commonly used and how you can pick the most appropriate one for your teams. We don't have a big whole series on sales methodologies as I think the sales process is just so much more important, but expect to see that same time next week then. Until next time, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve.

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