Many companies are understandably reluctant to adjust their sales process, especially if it’s reliably generating revenue. However, risk aversion can blind sales leaders to genuine opportunities to optimize their sales process and achieve better results with less effort or fewer resources.
In B2B sales, things change quickly. Something that worked a year ago might not be as effective in the present.
Sales process optimization isn’t a one-and-done activity. It’s an iterative, ongoing process. At ZoomInfo, we’re constantly looking for ways to further optimize and refine our sales process, and it’s important for businesses hoping to remain competitive to do the same.
What Is a Sales Process?
A sales process consists of a repeatable series of steps that a salesperson can use with a prospect to move that potential customer down the conventional sales funnel.
While different companies incorporate different steps, most sales processes involve:
- Sales prospecting
- Initiating contact
- Identifying needs
- Presenting offers
- Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Closing deals
Once you’ve closed a deal, you start all over again — hopefully with a better list of referrals or repeat sales.
It seems pretty simple. But the typical B2B sales cycle can take anywhere from three to nine months — sometimes even longer for enterprise businesses.
A host of obstacles stand in the way of sales reps being able to close a deal in a relatively short time. One of the biggest and most common hurdles is a poorly-defined, loosely-monitored sales process.
Why You Need a Sales Process
Businesses that have an effective sales process share many common characteristics:
- Higher conversions. Lead conversion is partially dependent upon the design of your sales process. While a great marketing campaign or sales pitch can contribute toward closing a deal, businesses that adopt a more holistic approach to sales tend to see more success.
- Bigger deals. Sales professionals who have a well-structured sales process to follow tend to be better equipped to target and nurture the larger accounts that generate more revenue. Sales teams that follow a standardized sales process also tend to close more high-value deals, because the sales journey for prospective customers feels more coherent.
- Quicker sales cycles. The B2B sales cycle can be long, and sales reps often find themselves wasting a lot of time trying to sign deals that will never close. A solid sales process will help reps, sales managers, and account executives recognize a lost deal earlier. This is why qualifying prospects is an important step in any sales workflow.
- Happier sales reps. What sales rep would turn down the opportunity to land more high-value deals in a shorter time? While the mood of your team is harder to quantify than the other aspects of the sales cycle, a happier, less-stressed workforce is likely to produce bigger numbers in the longer term — not to mention the retention benefits.
The Challenges of Building a Sales Process
Sales, especially in B2B, has rarely been more difficult. Prospective buyers have more information at their disposal than ever before, and are engaging salespeople significantly later in the purchasing journey. Competition has never been more intense, which has led to unprecedented buyer choice.
And, perhaps more importantly than anything else, investors and buyers have ratcheted up expectations of the value they want to see from companies’ products and services.
With these challenges in mind, it’s vital for sales leaders to build robust yet flexible sales workflows for their teams that allow them to focus on what really matters — demonstrating genuine value and helping prospects solve their problems.
- Much of the buyer’s journey happens without help from a sales rep. Data from Gartner reveals that B2B buyers spend just 17% of their time actively engaging with sellers, which means it’s crucial for salespeople to prospect effectively and maximize the impact of time spent engaging with prospective buyers.
- Leaks in the sales pipeline can be hard to pinpoint. Is your team having problems with prospecting, nurturing, closing, or upselling? If your reps are struggling with any of these steps, you may have a leaky pipeline. Examine your team’s sales data to identify potential weak points. Do you have the right reps assigned to the right accounts? Are you confident in the accuracy of your data? How are you evaluating individual reps’ performance and recalibrating expectations?
- Customers appreciate personalization. Marketing personalization at scale is a huge challenge. B2B customers want unique experiences that include multiple touchpoints, through various channels. Many companies are adopting account-based experience (ABX) programs to deliver dynamic content to prospective and existing accounts and offer a more personalized experience tailored specifically to relevant pain points.
4 Methods for Designing a Solid Sales Process
For anyone who has worked in sales, the individual elements of a successful sales process will be familiar. But the overall structure, and how the plan takes shape, can be particular to each team, leader, and company.
There are many ways to construct a winning process. But for sales leaders approaching this task for the first time, there are some standard sales process templates that are worth exploring.
Draw a Sales Process Map
One option is to visualize the elements of your sales process reflecting the flow of events, with connections between key moments in the sales process. This kind of layout is called a sales process map.
Sales process maps should be simple to create and easy to interpret. But take care to ensure your map doesn’t skim over important nuances or bulldoze past the flexibility needed at high-value parts of the process — in some cases, the map should be more like a guide than a list of hard-coded instructions.
Design Your Own Sales Process Flowchart
Summarizing and visualizing the movements of prospects through the buyer’s journey can be a challenge. One way to approach this problem is by using a flowchart, which allows you to show the relationships between different sales process stages and integrate variables within your overall plan.
Flowcharts can also be cyclical. This means that new leads that drop out initially can be fed back into the process when they re-emerge. Likewise, flowcharts can account for the entire customer relationship. This can be very useful if your business model or sales approach is based around customer loyalty.
Create a Buyer-Aligned Sales Process
Buyer-aligned sales processes are more linear than flowcharts, but less prescriptive than maps. The idea here is to avoid making a concrete list of sales activities, and instead focus on the needs and pain points of your customers.
Businesses that successfully deploy this style of plan provide reps with a greater understanding of what potential customers are looking for at each stage of the process. It will also include the decisions that your prospects will have to take at each stage.
Buyer-aligned sales processes break down tasks to be completed into two categories: buyer activities and seller activities. Buyer activities include building internal consensus, coordinating with relevant stakeholders, and reviewing proposals. Seller activities include demonstrating the ROI of the product or service, conducting demos, and creating and presenting proposals.
9 Key Steps to Optimizing Your Sales Process
Having drafted a plan for your sales process using one or a combination of the ideas above, the next step is to optimize it.
Adding the following steps into your sales workflow should take your efficiency to the next level — which should be reflected in your overall ROI.
1. Define the Customer Journey
The most efficient way to define your customer journey is conducting interviews with your sales team about how target customers progress through your sales funnel.
Which decision-makers are typically involved in purchasing decisions? How do you build trust and credibility with them? How many touchpoints do you need?
These questions will help you to determine various aspects of your overall process, allowing reps to know what to expect with each sale.
2. Build Out ICPs
If you want to ensure your sales team is focused on the right type of prospects, crafting detailed ideal customer profiles (ICPs) is imperative. These buyer personas can inform every stage of the sales process, from outreach to your closing style.
To create effective ICPs, start by categorizing potential leads into two or three primary personas. Then, study your buyers in detail. Identify their demographics, role titles, and pain points. Determine the size of their business and an estimate of their budget.
If you don’t know where to start, always turn to the data. Firmographic and technographic data as well as intent data are great starting points for building out buyer personas, because they are reflective of real people.
This information can give your reps the upper hand during negotiations. Just as importantly, it can help your team to build long-lasting strategic relationships with ideal prospects — they are usually more fruitful than quick wins.
3. Identify Pipeline Bottlenecks and Leaks
Even with your ICPs as reference, you may encounter some prospective buyers who simply aren’t suited to your offer.
Ideally, a high percentage of prospects who enter your funnel should become qualified leads, and those leads should progress through the sales funnel at a steady pace. When this doesn’t happen, it means something is wrong with either your sales process or your offer.
If leads consistently fall away at a specific stage in the process, you may have a pipeline bottleneck or leak.
The solution to this is typically a good lead nurturing campaign. Gaining new leads means nothing if they don’t actually move through the funnel. The goal is to nurture leads over time so that when they are ready to buy, they’ll knock on your door.
4. Prioritize Sales and Marketing Alignment
While sales and marketing teams have similar goals, they often struggle to work together effectively.
Instead of working against each other, sales and marketing should collaborate on determining quarterly goals, defining leads, and sticking to interconnected KPIs.
On a more operational level, the two departments can also:
- Pass knowledge of pain points down the funnel
- Work on creating consistent messaging
- Improve customer data sharing between CRM and MAP systems
- Collaborate on content offers
5. Use Automation
Sales processes have many moving parts and they can quickly become incredibly complex. This is why automation tools can really make a difference.
Sales automation technology is improving rapidly, allowing sales teams to hand off laborious tasks to intelligent software. From simple prospecting to advanced intent data, you can find tools, and even all-in-one platforms, that assist with delivering each step of the buyer journey.
The primary benefit here is that sales reps can spend more time on the human side of sales. If a machine can handle data collection and lead scoring, your team should be concentrating on turning leads into customers.
6. Measure KPIs
Sales reps need to know which specific sales KPIs they should be working toward, and managers should provide continuous feedback and update their team on progress being made.
Metrics that actually improve sales performance, rather than just vanity metrics, should be prioritized. These include:
- Sales cycle length
- ACV per demo
- Win rate
- Average Selling Price (ASP) vs. product mix
- Seller productivity by tenure
Whichever mix of metrics you choose, be sure to gather data from every stage of the pipeline. It’s only with a complete overview that managers can shape processes, and the wider sales strategy.
7. Upskill Your Team
A well-defined sales process is only as effective as the people who apply it. Even if your sales team tries their very hardest to follow your plan, they won’t get far without the right skills.
For this reason, training should be a priority for businesses that want to optimize their processes.
This starts with assessment. Work out the strengths and weaknesses of your sales team as a whole, and narrow your focus on the specific skills of individual reps. This analysis may uncover deficiencies that should be addressed. Some reps, for example, may be better-suited to certain types of accounts, or may benefit from specialized training.
Identifying and addressing such problems is vital if you want a sales process that works in the real world.
8. Refine Qualification Criteria
Although effective sales management calls for holistic thinking, it’s worth paying special attention to the first steps in the sales process. Why? Because unless your pipeline is filled with truly qualified leads, the rest won’t matter.
Businesses that embrace sales process optimization tend to update their lead qualification criteria on a rolling basis, because key buying indicators change frequently. Take your eye off the ball for a few months, and your entire sales operation could be misaligned with your ICPs.
As qualification criteria are refined, reps need to be kept in the loop. Sales managers should educate their teams about the latest updates, and train reps to probe for specific information during initial conversations, sales presentations, and product demos.
9. Leverage Customer Feedback
In B2B sales, it’s easy to think of potential prospects and qualified leads as faceless entities, or numbers on a spreadsheet.
Yet the process of turning prospects into customers is all about human interaction. One bad conversation or failure to follow up is all it takes to lose the trust of both your contact and potentially jeopardize weeks or months of work. No offer or sales technique can overcome bad experiences throughout the customer lifecycle.
To avoid such pitfalls, it’s vital to listen to your customers. Consider setting up surveys, interviews, and focus groups to discover frustrations that are common among your customers.
After implementing changes based on this feedback, you can use future surveys to measure customer satisfaction improvements over time.
Sales Process Optimization Always Leaves Room for Improvement
It can take a lot of trial and error in order to figure out what works best for your company. The most important step is to measure progress and KPIs, because that will tell you what needs adjustment. ZoomInfo can help you to gather the sales intelligence you need for making better sales decisions. Contact sales today to discover how our platform can enhance your sales efforts.