The 5 Steps to Create a Sales Process

1. Start with Observation

Research closed deals to create your very own sales process. 

Whether you realize it or not, you're already following some sort of sales process, even if you haven't mapped it, defined it, and refined it. To start the sales process creation, pick out your most recent 10 sales (that closed), examine each one, and try to find answers to these questions:

• Where did the lead come from?
• What major steps did you follow throughout the entire process?
• How much time was there between each step?
• How long did the entire process take?
• When and how did you communicate with the customer?
• What did you and the customer discuss?

2. Follow up with Mapping

Grouping activities according to goals creates focus. 

As you went over those 10 sales with the questions in mind, you probably started noticing some patterns, and can probably generate some generic answers based on the overall information. Now, start to think about how those answers fit into the following five stages of the sales process:

1.    Prospecting: the time you spend searching for leads
2.    Connection: the first contact where you determine if you'll move forward pursuing that prospect
3.    Researching: finding out additional information about the lead so that you can customize the sales experience
4.    Presenting: when you offer up your sales pitch, presentation, or demonstration to a qualified lead
5.    Closing: the final stage of making the sale, which includes quoting, negotiating, approval from decision makers, etc.
   

3. Define Your Stages

This is a key step! At this point, you must determine the triggers that caused a lead to move from one stage of the sales process to the next. For instance, what turned a prospect into a connection, and what got a prospect to jump from the presentation stage to the closing stage?

These triggers are the crux of your organization’s sales process, and the focus should be on the lead’s actions. You can even use things like surveys and interviews to find out concrete answers. These are the steps that your sales team will repeat, hopefully with success, to secure future sales.

4. Be Prepared to Fine-Tune Your Approach

Once you know what successfully moved a lead from one stage to another, you can work at repeating these steps to obtain new sales in the future. However, it’s integral that you be vigilant about making changes as necessary to achieve the best results. Your tactics may have to be changed or tweaked over time, as fads come and go, as you learn new information, as your customers change, and as other factors affect the success of your sales process.

5. Finish by Measuring Your Process

The only way to be sure that your process is working is to track your progress. To do this, you'll have to focus on key metrics like conversions, how long the process takes if you're increasing your success rate, if your speed is improving, and if you're increasing the overall number of leads moving through the process.

A sales process is crucial for any organization that cares about having an effective and proven procedure that the sales team can follow to achieve success. Developing a sales process is all about looking at past sales to determine what worked, what didn’t work, what you can do in the future, and figuring out concrete steps to follow at each stage of the sales process to secure more sales.

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