Your sales process is key to the success of your business

Yet, many businesses lack a structured sales process.

In a B2B environment – where core products and services are becoming more and more commoditised – more often than not, customers make their supplier choices on the most visible processes. As suppliers, we live and die daily by the output performance of these critical and inter-related processes, as perceived by customers.

The two processes that matter most are:

1. Your sales process
2. Your order-to-delivery (service fulfilment) process

So, how do you get a seamless sales process up and running in your business?

1. To optimise your sales process, focus first on optimising the efficiency and customer friendliness of your order-to-delivery process.

Our studies show that there is anywhere between 15-35% of Sales Execs’ time wasted on value-destroying activities focused on fixing problems in the order-to-delivery process.

If your order-to-delivery process is streamlined and customer friendly, your salespeople can spend 15-35% more time on the front foot driving proactive sales activity.

2. Manage, monitor and measure your sales process as a process.

Many B2B sales managers do not really understand their responsibility in terms of a structured sales process.
Many corporations manage their sales function as though it were an art form; dominated by personality, chemistry, relationships, entrepreneurialism and other idiosyncratic and episodic characteristics. Yet, walk up the corridor to Accounts Payable or onto the shop floor in the plant out the back, and you often find a very different management and discipline approach – with people and work managed as processes.

Your sales process needs to be underpinned by the same rigours and disciplines as your other business processes.

3. Recognise the validity of managing, monitoring and measuring the farming and hunting processes as two interconnected, parallel, but – nonetheless – separate sales processes.

Our view of the B2B sales organisation is that there is not one sales process, but two – a farming (account management) process and a hunting (prospecting) process.

The farming process is a stand alone, albeit parallel, process to the hunting or prospecting process – and should be managed, measured and monitored accordingly.

Follow these three steps, and put a sales process in place in your business to drive new customer acquisition and farm additional revenue from existing accounts.

• For more insights like this, check out our sales process tips.
• To speak to an experienced B2B sales consultant, contact us.