The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Sales Process - Sandler Training

Sales processes. Everyone's favorite process, other than maybe the Krebs cycle and mitosis, although those ones are pretty high up there. If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, then you don't know what you're doing. That timeless quote by management innovator W. Edwards Deming has driven more than 50 years of innovation. And when it comes to deploying a sales process to help your team succeed, even the newest methods are built on the shoulders of giants. Boop. Imagine that. I'm way bigger than I actually am. Those are the kinds of shoulders that I'm talking about. You know what I'm saying? Real OG influencers like Dale Carnegie, Zig Ziglar and David Ogilvy. Another one of those pioneers is David H. Sandler, who founded the Sandler sales process way back in 1967. What's up? It's Shamal from HubSpot. And in this video I'm gonna show you how HubSpot teamed up with the world renowned Sandler Training to update the classic sales process for the modern age of remote everything. And we created an online course in hybrid selling that you can take for free over at HubSpot Academy. You already know where the link is. It's in the description. Be sure to subscribe to the channel and ding that notification bell. Sales are the lifeblood of any business. No sales, then you're probably not going to have any business. You know what I'm saying? But sales alone aren't always enough. You need reliable revenue that you can count on so you can plan for your next quarter or your next year or your next product release. You ever playing like the Legend of Zelda, like a video game and you're about to die, but you find some hearts or a potion and that revives you, keeps you going for a little bit, that sales. Now imagine playing that same game with a map that tells you how to get to the hearts or the potions. That map is your sales process. And keep finding those hearts until you get to the final boss. Then it's one parry here, a slash there, boom. Everybody's getting a holiday bonus because your sales are going through the roof. It's a very mixed metaphor, but I'm sure you guys understand why what I'm saying. But a sales process can give you more than just reliable revenue. It also lets you scale up your sales efficiently by giving new team members the tools they need to start putting points on the board almost immediately. And your sales process isn't just something you set and forget a well managed sales process should be constantly updated with new insights derived from your team's experience in the field. This way, a lesson learned by one member of your team can benefit the whole team. Because when I'm eating the whole team eatin, you know what I'm saying? This is important because six in 10 salespeople say that they don't change their approach once they figure out what works and what doesn't. Having a sales process that evolves over time encourages your team to evolve like Pokemon. And the ability to change is essential in today's selling landscape. So I think you get why experts have been trying to unlock the perfect sales process for more than a century. Sales also used to involve a lot of traveling, sometimes to a prospect's office across town or sometimes across the country. All this was falling out of favor even before the pandemic sent workers home. What's needed today is a hybrid sales process. That's why HubSpot partnered with Sandler Training to create a new free course at HubSpot Academy called Selling in a Hybrid World. You can click the link in the description to check it out. To learn more, we spoke to Mike Montague, Director of Community Engagement at Sandler Training. Mike's sales education began when he was still in high school thanks to his father, a Sandler trainer. Today he's a certified trainer himself and hosts many of the company's podcasts and videos.

Over the last few years, travel restrictions, travel expenses and distributed workforces have made it very important to be able to sell in a hybrid environment where you can't get face to face or only some of the people can be face to face, and you need to include remote teams and buyers as well.

Obviously there are a lot of advantages to remote selling, like doing it with your PJ pants on. But this new hybrid environment affects every step of the sales process, from prospecting to closing. So before we go any further, we should break down each step of the sales process. It can change a little depending on which system you use, but it goes something like one Prospecting. This is where you go out and find potential leads to pitch. When you use the inbound marketing method, the whole idea is that leads come to you, but most businesses still use some method of proactive prospecting to generate leads. Even before work from home became the norm, most prospecting happened remotely through calls or emails. Some marketing qualified leads came from conferences and trade shows, but online conferences have done a pretty good job at creating digital connections. You can just slide right into those DMs. And as I've said before, mine are open. Please hit me up. The next step in the sales process is discovery. This can be subdivided into activities like lead qualification and company research. But what the stage ultimately means is engaging with the buyer, not to sell them, but to understand their needs and learn how decisions get made. That way, when it is time to pitch, you know you're pitching the right solution to the right people in an organization. Traditionally, the discovery process would usually take place over a series of calls. But in a hybrid world, it's really up to all parties to decide the best method to communicate.

Buyer might prefer direct messages over social media, or you might have a Slack channel open with them, or you might have a video chat. With some people live and other people remote, there's a lot of advantages to that, but there can also be a lot of distractions.

Using the Saylor method, the discovery phase involves an upfront contract, which is basically an agreement between the buyer and the seller setting the terms to guide the sales process or all the way to closing. This was Sandler's big innovation and it's even more relevant today.

We want to agree up front about what will happen through the rest of the sales process. So that means getting equal business stature with your buyers and understanding that you have the right to ask some questions too, and that you're going to need some information in order to do an accurate presentation or proposal later. So you're going to want to ask questions about their budget, about their needs, about their decision making process and, and if we understand these things before we do our presentation or proposal, we'll get more accurate information and we'll make sure that everything is aligned and as efficient as possible as we move forward from here.

So now you've done all your homework, which I wish I could say. You know what the buyer is looking for and you've determined the best way to give it to them. Now it's time to pitch the buyer on the solution. But in a hybrid environment, it's almost impossible to get everyone in one room. So instead of just showing up with some slides and bagels and your good stuffed animal friend sub dude, there's a little extra planning that needs to be done to make sure remote attendees can still feel the full impact of your pitch.

When doing hybrid presentations, there's a few things that are a little bit different than what you would normally do in a live selling environment. Can you share a collaborative document? Are you going to record or can you share your screen? Can you get other people engaged by using polls or chats or any type of interactive quiz, anything that builds buyer engagement so that they're not checking their email or tuning out. In this hybrid environment, of course, the.

Whole idea of pitching can still sound like a hard sell. That's why Sandler calls this step fulfillment.

Salespeople have a tendency to either be too aggressive and they try too hard on the close, then they have to overcome stalls and objections and almost have an adversarial relationship with buyers. But if you can work with your buyers in a collaborative process like this sales process we've been describing, you should have co created the solution. And the hardest close you'll ever need to use is what would you like to do next?

No matter what you call it, if this stage of the sales process is successful, you'll soon have more revenue in the bank, A couple more hearts before you fight Ganondorf at the end of Legend of Zelda. But we're not quite at the end of the hybrid sales process. Nurturing your client, checking in, upselling are all part of the ongoing relationship. So is getting referrals, which can mean many different things in the hybrid environment.

You can also use social media tools to encourage LinkedIn and introductions, or get ratings and reviews that can help your business going forward.

This leads us back to prospecting and the whole sales process begins again. If you're ready to learn more about the hybrid sales process, don't forget to click that link to the HubSpot Academy course we just released with Sandler training. But before you do, be sure to give this video a like and subscribe to the HubSpot YouTube channel for more sales lesson coming very soon. Now, if you'll excuse me, Sandler and I are gonna go pitch Adam Sandler on some Sandler stuff. Not really sure what yet, but I'm hoping that the whole name thing works out in our favor. I'll see you next time. I'm just putting in words that aren't there, just making things up. Frankly.