8 Reasons to improve sales performance
To all CEOs, business owners and sales leaders: What if I told you you can outperform your competitors by 18 per cent?
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Not only that, what if you could be among the elite 60 - 72 per cent sales organisations whose salespeople always achieve their sales target? What difference would it make to your current sales performance if your win rate is 60 per cent?
The above are findings from a number of recent annual studies conducted by Vantage Point Performance (a leading sales management training and development firm), the Sales Management Association and from CSO Insights Sales Management Optimisation Study respectively. The findings sought to understand the importance of a formal sales process in driving sales performance.
In my consulting and training work, one of the first questions I ask during the need assessment stage is whether a business uses a sales process. The answers I receive to this question are usually mixed. There are those who don’t have any idea what a sales process is. Then there are those who claim they know what it is and actually have one but not documented or formal. Finally, there is the minority of businesses who have and use a formal sales process. The outlook takes a dramatic turn when it comes to the sales aptitude of salespeople I train and coach. One will typically find out that one of the biggest issues hindering many salespeople’s ability to achieve sales targets is not having a sales process to rely on.
What is a sales process?
A sales process is a step-by-step process for a sales organisation’s salespeople to follow from identifying target customers, initiating the sales with prospects through to when the prospect buys to become a customer.
Here are the eight (8) reasons a formal sales process will improve your sales performance:
- Increased win rates for your salespeople - Isn’t it a fact that you and I, at our individual levels, have and use a buying process? Just cast your mind back to the most recent item you may have purchased for instance, you must have definitely applied a process. Furthermore, with respect to business-to-business sales, it is evident these days that procurement departments use a clearly defined formal process such as the RFPs to identify the ideal suppliers, to qualify or disqualify them, and to award contracts to successful ones. Results of the CSO Insights 2014 Sales Optimisation Studies indicate that businesses who excel at aligning their sales process to customer buying cycle enjoy deal rates of 60 per cent, compared to 47 per cent and 43 per cent for their counterparts who are average or poor at aligning their sales process to customer-buying cycle. The lesson here is to “sell the way customers buy”.
- Generates more revenue - Results from a research recently conducted by Vantage Point Performance and the Sales Management Association revealed that there was an 18 per cent difference in revenue growth between companies that defined a formal sales process and companies that didn’t.
- Training and scalability – A formal or documented sales process used by every salesperson makes it easier and cost effective to train and ramp up new recruits very quickly who can hit the ground running. Training based on a sales process have been found to be much more successful and ???returns better ROI???.
- Improves consistency in sales results – The greatest thing about a sales process is its ability to make your salespeople deliver consistency in their sales numbers. This can only be achieved when they apply and comply with the process in all their transactions. What will a difference of 18 per cent in revenue growth do for your organisation just by getting existing salespeople to stick to a sales process, whilst the new recruits hit the ground running with great performance? On the contrary, sales organisations without a formal sales process are NOT consistent in their sales results.
- Improves forecasting – A sales organisation which trains its salespeople based on a formal sales process are better placed to deliver on their forecasts than those who don’t have one. It is more about the ability to predict sales for planning purposes.
- Allows for win/loss analysis – In view of the fact that a sales process is built from stage to stage, it allows salespeople to do a win/loss analysis by tracing their steps backwards to evaluate where they went wrong or what they did right resulting in a ‘win’ or ‘loss’.
- Shortens sales cycle - A formal sales process provides an opportunity to shorten your sales cycle because with a sales process, you will know at what stage in the pipeline a particular sales opportunity is; sales managers and salespeople can develop and implement specific prospect engagement strategies and activities with the aim of accelerating the opportunities. Successfully done, more sales can be closed within short periods instead of the normal long sales cycles.
- Sales management system – As a sales manager, you have the responsibility to coach and motivate staff. A sales process allows you to see the pipeline activities of your salespeople working through the sales process. Based on that, you are able to zero in on the strengths and weaknesses of your salespeople in specific areas of the sales process with the aim of helping fill the gaps. GB
Until next time, happy selling!
If you would like to learn more or have any questions about how to set up a sales process, contact the writer.
The writer is the C.E.O of Salesmark Services
He is also a Sales Consultant, Trainer & Coach
For FREE Consultation, you can reach him via
E-mail: [email protected]
Whatsapp: 0244279368