How to Develop a Winning Sales Process

By eHow Business Editor

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The best salespeople sometimes make the worst employees. To them, details, paperwork and sales managers are all things to be avoided. The reason: selling is a contact sport, and for the successful salesperson, office time is non-selling time. Because of this, business owners and sales management often find sales to be out-of-control and impossible to quantify. Only a good sales process can overcome the otherwise uncertain and ill-defined nature of sales.

Instructions

Step 1:Assess your sales team. Make sure you have the right number of salespeople, and that they are personable, team players, and generally easy to work with. Evaluate their level of knowledge about your business and industry. If necessary, consider hiring new sales reps and investing in sales training for your top producers. Remember, it's difficult to determine whether a given salesperson is truly achieving at the highest levels. Sales performance is a function not only of the individual, but also of the product being sold, the assigned territory and general market conditions.

Step 2:Identify the relevant sales steps. Follow a few sales from the initial contact through the successful (or unsuccessful) delivery of your product or service. List the important steps along the way, and evaluate them for their timeliness, efficiency, and effectiveness. If you find redundant and unnecessary steps, eliminate them. For each step that moves a sale forward, identify the positives of your strongest salespeople and the negatives of your weakest. Now, create a sales process map that's easy to follow, and document it as part of your new sales process.

Step 3:Ensure that all required steps are followed. Note that not every sale will track precisely with the process outlined in Step Two. If a sales rep attends an initial appointment and walks away with an order, you won't necessarily complain because three other steps were skipped. That's a potential trap, though: sometimes, those other steps are there because they help ensure that the customer is satisfied. And so, your sales reps must report their activities during each step, to avoid timewasters and missed opportunities.

Step 4:Track sales performance. Typically, this means tracking sales numbers by salesperson, customer, and product or service. Measuring which salespeople are effective is vital to ensuring that the company's pipeline of new business remains full. Knowing which customers and kinds of customers are buying the most, and which products and services they're buying, helps the organization develop effective marketing plans. Tools for tracking sales can range from a simple spreadsheet to a full-blown customer relationship management (CRM) application, depending on the size and complexity of your business.

Step 5:Manage the process. It would be a shame for all this planning to go to waste, and so it's your job as business owner or sales manager to read the activity and sales reports. Remember, your best sales reps will hate the process but follow it to the letter—no more and no less. If you ignore their efforts in following the process, you'll find that there's no process left to follow.