To design the most successful sales cycle and boost your conversion rates, follow these six tips:
Understand Your Buyer Persona
You must tailor your sales process to your ideal buyer. You can only design an effective one after interviewing your buyers.
So, you should take the following steps:
- Take a survey of your buyers to know how they want to buy your product or service
- Create a map of their buying process with primary buyer decisions and activities
- Ensure you include steps that buyers take without your direct input
With an insider’s view of your buyers’ thought process, you can begin designing a new sales process.
Design Your Strategic Sales Process
After you understand your buyers’ behavior, sketch a sales process to support their buying process.
To start, follow these steps:
- Design each stage, outlining the primary activities for each.
- Make the process simple to follow by using words your sales reps will understand.
- State the requirements needed to move from stage to stage.
- Give a clear description of what will qualify a prospect to move to the next step in the process.
- Use questions that must be answered with, “Yes,” or, “No.”
- Avoid using perceptions of sales reps to move your prospects to another stage.
After you’ve developed your strategic sales process, review it with your team.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”33443″ img_size=”large” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Enable Your Sales Team at Each Stage
Provide what your reps need at each stage including content, training and relevant technology and tools:
- Content — Let each department involved at each stage have the content they need for the prospect or customer. Without these materials, it’ll be difficult for them to move a lead forward.
- Training — Train your reps to perform all the activities at each stage. When they need to do a demo, for instance, make sure they have the training and skills to do it.
- Tools — Provide the tools, software and customer relationship management (CRM) implementations that drive success at each stage.
With the proper resources and training, you can implement the best sales process.
Enforce Your Sales Process
To succeed with your process, you must be determined to track, report and manage it. This stage is where an effective CRM comes in. Choose a productive CRM tool, and train salespeople to use it. Make sure each new hire for the sales team undergoes training to follow the entire sales process and knows how to use your CRM implementation.
Encourage your sales reps to use the established stages in the process to describe and report what they’re doing with each buyer as well. This information can be valuable for teaching, as well as assessing areas where you can improve your sales process.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]
Track Your Metrics
Measure the effectiveness of your process at each stage to know whether it matches your expectations. You must track the conversion rates at each phase. For instance, you must be able to state the number of demos you need to make to get a customer to buy your product. You also need to find out how long some customers spend at a given stage without moving. This metric gives you data for optimizing long phases and shortening the sales cycle.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”33444″ img_size=”large”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Optimize Your Process
After you’ve developed a process and you’re using and tracking it, go on to solve specific issues that arise with it. For instance, when a sales rep can’t achieve their personal sales goals, take a closer look at the reason why they’re losing deals. Then, help them optimize the process at that stage.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]To guarantee that your sales process continues to deliver the desired results, you need to:
- Ensure that only concrete buyer actions move them from one stage to another
- Keep abreast of new sales methodologies
- Get regular feedback from all your sales reps
- Use their input to perform frequent reviews and updates of your process
- Complete regular buyer surveys to monitor their changing needs and desires
- Evolve the process as your sales team discovers new ways to cycle prospects faster
Perfect your sales process with tools from LeadMaster
At LeadMaster, we help our clients use the best tools for CRM and market automation to track their sales process internally. We offer full customization of our software to meet your unique needs, and we make your total satisfaction our top priority. Let’s improve your sales process. Contact LeadMaster for a free 30-day trial today.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]