Ultimate guide to building an efficient sales process

What is a sales process?

Simply put, a sales process is defined as a repeatable set of steps that a salesperson performs over a sales cycle to convert a prospect into a customer. Usually a tried-and-tested process, it acts as a guide for salespeople to move a deal through the sales pipeline and close it.

Why is a sales process important for your sales team?

If you’re a sales manager handling a team with no sales process, let’s paint a picture: Your team is performing various sales activities each day across different accounts and deals, but the only metrics tracked are the number of deals closed and their value. There is no visibility into the sales activities performed, and when the revenue produced by the sales team fluctuates, no one has a clue why. Implementing a sales performance incentives could help incentivize specific activities and provide insights into what drives revenue fluctuations.

If this sounds familiar, then yes, your team needs a sales process. Here are five more ways you benefit by having a structured sales process:

A deeper understanding of your prospects

A defined sales process clearly outlines the buyer persona (BP) and the ideal customer profile (ICP) for prospective buyers. This helps salespeople understand whom they should be talking to, rather than waste time in all the leads they come across.

Get more qualified leads

When your salespeople can weed out the leads who are less likely to buy, they will be able to engage with and qualify the right prospects. Focusing efforts on prospects who are likely to close not only reduces the sales cycle but also justifies your salespeople's time and efforts. CRM software with AI lead scoring further helps them by ranking the leads based on their engagement with the product and the salesperson.

Always stay on course

Prospects need to hear from you an average of seven times before they decide to make a purchase. But in reality, most salespeople don’t have a follow-up plan. Sometimes, they follow up once, maybe twice, and when they don’t get a response, they move on to the next prospect. This inconsistency results in opportunities slipping through the cracks. A sales process with a winning sales cadence strategy reminds your salespeople when and how to follow up with the prospect. This keeps alive the prospect’s desire to make a purchase.

Utilize the right talent

With the sales team following a standard sales process, you will gain insight into your salespeople's performance along every stage of the sales cycle. For example, you'll know the number of emails sent out by a salesperson, the metrics associated with it (open rate, click rate, and bounce rate), number of dials, the calls-to-conversion rate, and so on. This not just tells you who is sending out the best emails and having engaging phone conversations, but also who needs help in those areas.

If you are using an Affordable CRM software that allows you to save email templates, you could repurpose the best emails and share them with salespeople who need help with their outreach.

Move deals seamlessly by understanding bottlenecks

Each salesperson should be accountable for sticking to the sales process and guiding the customer through a sale. With a sales process in place, you gain insights into stalled deals. A sales process not only tells you what but also how and when. So you can analyze bottlenecks and figure out how each bottleneck can be tackled.

Forecast accurate numbers

Having a clear picture of where each salesperson is in the sales process allows you to forecast revenue more accurately. With a highly functional sales process, your salespeople can keep your sales funnel full, ultimately boosting your revenue.

The 7 steps of a sales process

1. Prospecting

The first in the seven-step sales process is searching for new customers, better known as prospecting. To find prospects who will most likely buy your product and help your salespeople identify them, create buyer persona (BP) and ideal customer profile (ICP) documents. The best place to find knowledge about this is your company’s sales history. It is easier to construct them when you understand who bought from you and exactly why they did it.

• Study the deals and accounts previously won to spot a pattern in the customer and their company

• Map the roles of the prospect with their challenges and goals

• Identify how a pain point was leveraged to sell the customer on the absolute need for the product

• Create an easy-to-understand document with your findings and distribute it to your sales teams

Using the BP and ICP documents, identify an internal champion of the company—not necessarily the decision-maker. Create an outreach strategy or sales cadence by employing various prospecting methods. Here are a few prospecting techniques you can deploy:

• Cold email, followed by an email sequence

• Cold calling

• Social media and social selling using tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator

• Events and webinars conducted by your company or others in your industry

Once you catch your prospect’s attention, get the conversations flowing and establish a relationship with them. Then, schedule a call to further understand how you can cater to their needs.

Related article: The complete guide to sales prospecting

 Learn the process of prospecting and the different methods involved.

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2. Qualification/assessing needs

When the relationship with the prospect becomes warmer, they are ready for a call. The salesperson should initiate a discovery call with the prospect to further understand if the product can address the prospect’s challenges. 

There are several methodologies used to qualify prospects. The most commonly used is BANT (budget, authority, need, timeline). To identify if the prospect is sales-ready, the salesperson asks questions such as:

• Do you have enough budget for this project? If not, when are you likely to have it?

• What are the decision-making and sign-off processes in your organization?

• How are you presently handling this challenge? What do you expect differently from us?

• What does your timeline look like? By when do you need this solution implemented?

You could also employ other qualification methodologies such as CHAMP (challenges, authority, money, prioritization) or MEDDIC (metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identify pain, champion).

If the prospect fits the above criteria, you’ve got a good lead. Otherwise, you might have to rethink the prospect as they won’t be a good fit for the moment and will clog your sales pipeline. The ideal action here is to concentrate on other good-quality leads for sales lead optimization.  

3. Demonstration

After the prospect is sales qualified, the salesperson or the account executive schedules a demo call with the prospect. In this call, they explain the features of the product that are relevant to the prospect’s use case, focusing on how it could help them overcome their challenges. 

It is a good practice to plan your demo beforehand. Research your prospect, prepare use cases specific to their industry, and personalize the presentation. Building a good rapport is crucial at this stage, and sounding friendly and approachable is the key. Listen and empathize with the prospects’ challenges and address their concerns.

A tailored demonstration of the product can also be an effective way to show how the product could benefit the prospect. Tailored demos incorporate information gathered from the prospect to better position your product as a viable solution for them. Prospects are interested in how products and solutions will benefit them specifically. Demonstrating your product in action in a way that feels personal to your prospect facilitates more conversions and can accelerate your sales process.

While you advocate for your product’s benefits, don’t force it on them. Give them time and space to decide. That takes us to the next stage.

4. Evaluation

Product evaluation allows the potential customer to experiment with the product, using a free trial account for a limited period. The product's premium features may be offered to the customer to help them evaluate the product as a whole. 

During this period, it is ideal for the salesperson or the account executive to stay in touch with the prospect to ensure that their desire to buy is firm.

5. Objection handling/negotiations

Tackling objections is invariably part of the sales cycle. Buyers are hesitant to agree to a product without protest and need convincing. Based on their product usage, prospects can come back with various objections, ranging from concerns over privacy to product pricing. 

There are various objections you might encounter at this stage, but almost all of them will fit into one of these four categories:

1. Need: The prospect isn’t certain they need the product. To overcome this, you need to demonstrate how it can solve a key pain point in their life.

2. Urgency: Perhaps the prospect knows they want the product, but not right now. This can be overcome by offering time-sensitive promotions or discounts that create a sense of urgency and encourage them to close the deal.

3. Trust: The prospect might like the product, but they’re not sure about you or the brand. Establish trust by building rapport as a salesperson and creating a strong brand that people identify with. 

4. Money: This objection is perhaps the most difficult to overcome. You’ll need to prove the value of the product you’re offering or improve your strategy higher in the sales funnel to avoid spending time prospecting people who aren’t open to your price range. 

Though objections are a challenge, they can indicate the prospect’s interest in the product. By successfully negotiating objections, the prospect is convinced of the product's value and is willing to invest in it.

 6. Closing

Close to the finish line, this stage includes activities like the signing of final contracts, service level agreements (SLAs), implementation, customer success, support, and pricing. The two parties discuss the terms of the partnership, and in some cases, the legal teams from both sides have a chat. 

There are several effective closing techniques that salespeople use to get the prospect over the line and close the deal:

• Now-or-never closes: Make an offer that includes a special benefit while dialing up the urgency.

• Summary closes: Reiterate the product or service the prospect is purchasing. Go over the key features or benefits and end with a question to prompt a closing answer. 

• Question closes: Asking closing questions helps you overcome objections and puts the onus onto the prospect to give you a reason why they won’t close. This strategy helps them come to a decision themselves. 

• Assumptive closure. Assuming good intent from the start has a powerful psychological effect on the prospect, making them more likely to agree with you and close the deal. 

• Soft closes. This strategy works well on prospects you think won’t respond well to harder sales techniques. A soft close shows the benefits of your product without scaring the prospect away. 

• Alternative close: If they’re not biting at the deal you’ve offered, offering alternative products could be more appealing to your prospect. 

• Something-for-nothing close: Offering a gesture of goodwill can sometimes help to get the sale over the line. Whether it’s a free or complimentary gift or another year’s warranty, the prospect will feel they’re getting a better deal if there are free extras

Once your closing strategy works, cue a happy dance from the sales team because the prospect is now a customer, and the onboarding process follows.

 7. Nurturing

The final stage of the seven-step sales process is making sure your customers stay with you. 

Customer success is an underrated part of a sales process that is rarely done. However, nurturing a customer post-sale could decrease churn. With exceptional customer support, the client may return to purchase a higher plan or even refer the product to a few businesses.

 When all does not go well and the customer does not buy the product, sales can still benefit from nurturing. Understanding why the deal fell through is an indicator of how to nurture the prospect. In some cases, the timing may not be the best—the budget was already drafted, an important project is underway, or the decision-maker is away on vacation. These are factors that are clearly beyond control. In others, they could have been looking for a feature that the product does not have. This, once again, is a difficult position to be in. It leads to an inevitable “closed lost.” But all hope is not lost yet. Using email marketing, nurturing the lead could help revive them.

How to build a sales process?

Sales processes vary according to the industry and product. Some may focus on customer acquisition, while others focus on retention. That said, the following steps are unchanging across sectors.

1. Be clear on your goals

Before you begin creating your selling process, have a clear understanding of your goals and the key performance indicators (KPIs) to track in order to achieve them. 

Next, your salespeople need to understand their role in your organization and how they contribute to the bigger picture. Set micro-goals for your salespeople and track them. By attaining these micro-goals, you move toward your main target.

Siddharth Hosangadi, founder at GoPush Consulting, says every goal should be time-bound, so we should clearly define the timeline for the final goal and the milestones along the way.

Finally, rather than setting activity goals such as “200 emails per day," provide results-oriented goals such as “25% increase in email reply rate compared to last month.”

2. Establish a conversion funnel

Picture a funnel with water trickling through it. The wide brim can hold lots of water, but lower in the funnel, less water comes through. Similarly, the sales funnel starts off with a large number of leads, but only qualified leads move down further. 

For the funnel to make sense, each part of the funnel is assigned a number. The top of the funnel has X number of leads. The middle of the funnel has qualified leads, ideally X/2. The bottom of the funnel should have deals moving to close, X/4. 

Each stage of the selling process should also be numbered. If a salesperson sends out 100 emails a day, the expected open rate is 25, and the reply rate would be one. Keeping this in mind, the salesperson has to send out 500 emails a day to receive five leads each day.

Learn about the different stages of the sales funnel and how to create one for your business.

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3. Define an action for each stage

Each stage of the sales process must have different qualifying criteria. These criteria are defined by the number of interactions a prospect has with a salesperson and the outcome of it. 

For example, in the first step of the selling process, a lead is converted into an opportunity when they respond positively to an email or a call from the salesperson. During the discovery call, the prospect is qualified if they satisfy the requirements based on your qualification methodology. They slide across stages as they engage with the salesperson in negotiations. 

The prospect is converted into a customer when they agree to the deal and purchase the product.

4. Measure your sales process results

It is good to revisit your sales process every year to understand variations in your prospect’s buying process, the flaws in the current sales process, and how you can make it more effective. 

“Create milestones for each sales process with a definite time period and evaluate whether you and your team are meeting it. If yes, create other milestones and proceed again. If not, then check out for optimum solutions/necessary action and again repeat the procedure with new solution/action and evaluate,” says Shekhar Kamble, sales and marketing specialist at Al-Mutawaa Trading Company.

Tweaking your sales process is neverending. There will always be new methods and ideas to implement and challenges that come along with it. We discuss in detail about measuring and tweaking your sales process in later sections of this page.

5. Create a sales process for and with your sales team

You know your business inside out and have a sense of how sales should function. And whether you are creating the sales process from scratch or building on it, your salespeople are the ones who follow the system. So it is always a good idea to talk to your team and get their inputs.

If you are creating a sales process for the first time, have individual conversations with each of your salespeople and understand how they are performing their sales activities. 

If you are building on your sales process, talk to them about the roadblocks and challenges they face with the current process.

But it’s not completely about the team, either. You need to set ground rules and figure out what works best.

Hosangadi says: “It is the team/process/system which serves the goal, not vice versa. Hence, if a set of salespeople following the processes we have designed is taking us to our goals as per the timelines and milestones we have decided, then those people/processes are right for us. Else, we may need to modify the team/process as appropriate.”

How to automate your sales process?

A considerable part of the sales process is repetitive and monotonous. The activities done by a salesperson are the same across all leads, irrespective of deal size. Each stage of the sales process has a task that can be automated: Prospecting leads, sending cold emails, and tracking email metrics are a consistent part of the salesperson’s routine. And that is just top of the funnel activities. 

Once a prospect is converted into a lead, the activities are again clockwork. Emails regarding follow-up, meeting confirmation, and those explaining the trial account processes do not require much change. The ideal way to automate these tasks is with a customer relationship management (CRM) software—given that all the necessary information is already in it. Here are some ways you can map your sales process with the CRM.

Automate lead assignment

Whether you are a growing business or you have leads pouring in every day, you need to collect all the leads in one place. And that’s just half the job. The next step is to assign the leads to the right salesperson without any conflict. 

Did you know 30-50% of sales go to salespeople who contact prospects first? But sadly, only 7% of them respond within five minutes, while more than half of the surveyed salespeople take almost five days to respond to the prospect.

Putting two and two together, you could surmise that time is of the essence in sales and your salespeople need to contact prospects as soon as possible. They cannot sit around waiting for the sales manager to assign leads to them. This is where automating lead assignments comes into play.

Set predefined conditions in your CRM tool and watch leads being assigned to your salespeople in a fair and round-robin fashion. So, for example, prospects signing up for a particular product from say, Arizona, are assigned to salespeople who take care of that region and product.

Automate daily outreach

Fact: A salesperson spends 21% of their time sending emails to prospective customers. That is a crucial time that could be spent interacting with customers. Eliminate typing the same email multiple times by creating a template that could be personalized for each contact.

Consider an example. If a customer signs up for a product trial account, an automated welcome email is the first touchpoint. As the customer traverses through the product trial, follow-up emails are sent containing information on how to set up the product, explaining modules of the product, and how best to integrate with other apps.

Automate pipeline activity

As your salespeople move prospects down the sales funnel and along your defined sales process, they might not always remember to change the status of a deal in their pipeline. 

This could get even more complicated if you’re selling different products or targeting different markets.

Automate your sales process to move deals across the sales pipeline based on parameters such as prospects’ engagement or salespeople’s activities. In other instances where you may have multiple pipelines, you can configure deals to move from one pipeline to another automatically.

For example, Peter Kral, CEO of FundraisingBox, says they have set up sales process automation to copy all the key details from the Prospect module to the Customer module when a deal is marked as “won.”

Know what your team is up to

Creating a performance report manually could be painstaking. Instead, you could set up a reports dashboard that gives a visual representation of key metrics weekly or monthly.

For example, track regular metrics such as emails sent, phone calls completed, and pipeline movements; keep track of deals won or customers in a higher price plan, etc. And the best part is, you can have them delivered to your inbox as well.

Prioritize leads and manage them easily

The top of your sales funnel could be overflowing with leads. By definition, these leads are people who have interacted with the product and website. But not all leads are the same. A lead who replied to an email should be ranked higher than a lead who clicked on it. This ranking of leads on the basis of priority is known as lead scoring.

By assigning scores to leads, the funnel can be structured by priority. Reassigning these leads to salespeople based on score and territory could get mundane and taxing. Set defined rules for distribution and reach out to the most interested leads first.

Automate the everyday workflow

The sales cycle is a repetitive one, with multiple errands that are repeated often. Tasks like follow-up emails, invoice generation, or report generation are done regularly.

Doing this manually on a never-ending loop is mundane for the sales executive. Automating sales processes for each step of the sales cycle with sales processing software will make their lives easier.

For example, if a prospect responds to an email sent by a salesperson, the status of the prospect can be automated to change to “Responded” without a manual type-in by the salesperson.

A comprehensive CRM streamlines your sales team's workflow by automating mundane tasks with ready-to-use templates.

Learn more about automating your sales process with our article on '5 Ways to Streamline Sales Automation'.

Discover best practices

Have individual conversations with your top performers to find out what they are doing right. But this isn’t just about your top performers. Understanding their sales activities helps you extend their excellence across the sales team.

For example, if 40% of your salespeople drive most of your revenue, imagine the impact if their best practices were shared with the rest of your salesforce.

How to improve your sales process

The effectiveness or the success of your sales process depends on finding the right set of sales activities that lead to the desired sales outcome. Here are some ways to boost the effectiveness of your sales process.

Resolve bottlenecks through challenges

Challenges are more than common in the sales industry. And if your salespeople do not come forward with their challenges, you need to go to them. Understanding their roadblocks will give you an in-depth insight into any bottleneck in the sales pipeline and help you arrive at a more accurate solution. So ask, listen, and take action.

Sales enablement

We cannot stress this enough: You need to equip your salespeople with the right resources and upskill them to perform better, ultimately bringing in more revenue.

Provide them with various materials such as email and social messaging templates that have worked in the past. Repeated training and coaching in different areas such as cold calling and objection handling can boost their skill set and enable them to engage with prospects better.

Common mistakes to avoid

Forgetting that the sales process is always a work in progress

A sales process is never fully complete. There will always be new challenges, new goals, and adjustments you have to make based on your forecast and data analysis.

Not documenting your experiments and learnings

Maybe you thought incorporating a particular action into your sales process would work, and it did for some period before derailing. On the other hand, what you thought might not work could have given you tremendous results. 

While you tweak your sales process according to your learnings, it is important to document your experiments and outcomes so that you can always go back to it in case of any second thoughts.

Mark E., regional sales director at Staples, regularly reviews his sales process based on close rates, market conditions, volatility, etc. He says it helps him understand the cost, margins, and sales rep capacity to aid in developing the sales process and which types of methodologies to adopt. Concentrating on the end goal while ignoring the micro-goals

As we stressed earlier, these micro-goals have to be achieved for you to boost the revenue. Not being specific about your micro-goals, in other words, your salespeople’s metrics can lead to chaos and derail you from achieving your target.