Do this exercise. Gather your sales team together and ask them:
“Everyone please document your sales process.”
What answers do you think you will get? Will you get similar sales processes from the group? Will your more effective sales people have a different process than your ineffective sales people?
Now ask yourself: why don’t you have a sales process? Managing a sales team without one is the same as a doctor doing surgery without a thought on what the process would be. If you knew the doctor had no process for the surgery, would you let them operate on you?
So why are you letting your people sell without one?
You cannot operate an effective sales culture without a documented sales process that everyone is following.
- A documented sales process creates an environment where sales people can give feedback about what is working and not working.
- A documented sales process gives the sales manager something to manage to. Without a defined process, how could a manager possibly know where the defects are in a sales person’s activities and actions?
- A documented sales process makes sales bottlenecks easy to diagnose. If you know the problem, you can fix it. Troubleshooting against a loose process only leads to loose and ineffective coaching.
- A documented sales process makes changes to the process easier to change and communicate to theteam. If the process evolves, even slightly, everyone immediately knows what to do and how to do it.
Given all of this, nearly 100% of our clients do not have a documented sales process at all before they start with us.
Are you going to keep struggling with sales malpractice, or are you going to get it fixed?
Whether you have a loose sales process or a well-defined one, click here to measure the effectiveness of your process using our Sales Process Grader.
