Defining Sales Processes
A Complex Sale is simply defined as one where there is more than one person participating in the purchase decision. This may be a single decision-maker supported by various official and unofficial influencers or many decision-makers. With small business defined as those with fewer than 100 employees, and medium-sized business with fewer than 1000 employees, many B2B transactions will involve a complex sale.
Complex sales take longer to close and the chief risk is wasted resource expenditure on unwinnable deals. A formalized sales process mediates risk by answering the ‘fit’ questions before the process can proceed from one stage of the sales cycle to the next. A formal Sales Process is a form of qualification that assures and optimizes revenue generation.
You can develop your own Sales Process but I highly recommend that you adopt or customize proprietary methodologies such as Miller Heiman. Many SFA (Sales Force Automation) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools embody the principles of these Sales Processes.
A critical component of your sales process is modeling the decision-making process of your target customer. Often they will have a semi-formal process for purchase decisions. In this case you have a ready-made model which the target customer will generally disclose to you.
The Sales Cycle assumes intelligence-gathering at every stage but the initial stage is probably the most important. Your first contact into the target customer is the Entry Point. Often individuals in organizations are tasked with vetting vendors. In traditional businesses this individual is called a purchasing agent. In technology companies it may be a Product Manager. Whatever the title and function, you must identify this individual, engage that individual and persuade sufficiently to allow you to proceed to the next step.
Just as importantly, you must gather the information you need to help you decide if it is worthwhile to proceed to the next step. To the less experienced this may be opposite of what should be done, but it is essential to a winning Sales Process. Think of discarding cards on your way to a winning poker hand.
Great post, Lynn. Right on target.
Just two additional points:
First, an out of the box sales process from any vendor isn’t the right approach. Every selling company is in a different situation: your products/services, your brand, size, capability of your people, your customers, competitors, pricing, market, sales resources available, etc. A sales process has to be built or adapted to meet those conditions (and more) or else there will be gaps between what your sales people do and what they need to do to win business. Basically, they won’t be selling to their customers in the way that their customers expect to buy. That’s a problem.
Second point. Sales training is most effective when the process(es), tools, procedures, etc., are already in place and management has been trained on supporting the new process. Reps then must be trained on the use of the process, end-to-end, not on individual discrete skills, the way training is often done today. My firm has done a lot of research about sales training. I can tell you a lot of companies get this wrong.
Dave Stein
31 Jan 09 at 1:37 pm
You need to differentiate between a sales PROCESS and a sales METHODOLOGY. Miller Heiman does not dictate, or recommend a sales process, rather, we have a sales methodology that overlays onto a sales process.
For example, a sales process might be – send direct mail campaign, take inbound calls in call center, forward qualified leads to an outside sales rep who calls on a prospect in person, sales person performs discovery/diagnostic of issues, demo of product to key buying influences, prepare proposal, present proposal, close.
Miller Heiman’s methodology is about the “how” of doing all that. For example, the Strategic Selling sales methodology has the salesperson uncover all the buying influences, find how how and why they want to buy, find out the business results they want, find out the key personal reasons they want to buy; and a whole lot more.
The point is that regardless of your sales process, there is always an Economic Buying Influence, always a Technical Buying Influence, always a User Buying Influence, etc. (That is true even if they are all the same people!
Miller Heiman’s sales methodologies are built so they can overlay on virtually any complex sales process and are intended to map and work along with virtually any of your customer’s buying processes.
BobH
1 Feb 09 at 11:28 am
That was a great post. It is inspiring for all. Thanks for sharing that piece.
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