Sales Strategy Turned into Sales Process

John Golden, the Chief Strategy Officer of Pipeliner CRM, interviewed me recently to understand the most important topics related to the creation and implementation of sales process. Listen in below on the topics we cover this week, and the recommendations made on how you can drive revenue through a customized sales process.

Q: You get your sales strategy down and you’ve done your proper homework and you want to translate this into a functional and well defined sales process, what are the first steps?

A: Well the first steps are to understand how people are buying from you, who are those individuals and what are the activities that they will be taking on as they determine what needs are in the organization. How will these individuals go through and make a purchasing process? How do they acquire products or services? Before we get into the selling and the misnomers of a sales process, we want to make sure we understand what’s happening on the customer or the prospect side to actually procure your product or service.

Q: One of the things I’ve come across a lot in the past is: you lay out a sales process but people interpret the stages differently. Define what happens within a sales process stage.

A: Yes, we define what happens in a sales process for the customer or prospect first, then we go in and figure out what things the seller or people who are supporting the seller should be doing during those stages. Are you advancing or are you continuing in stages? What’s the exit? The exit has to be agreed from one stage to the next by the prospect or the customer. We put these things in and don’t want it to be burdensome in a sales process. It doesn’t have to be contractual every time but we do need to get an agreement that we’re moving forward and it’s based on the definition within those stages.