Every company that makes money has a sales process, so you should have one, too. But worry not, that’s nothing to be afraid of.
A sales process is simply a “repeatable set of steps your sales team makes with a prospect (lead), to move them from an early stage to a closed customer”.
And a good sales process is one that helps you close deals more often and gives them a framework to follow.
So, it should really be in your interest (and in the interest of your company), to define and set it up soon as possible (and in the best possible way), if you want to control a repetitive and scalable sales process.
You should customize the CRM or your sales platform of choice with your company’s own unique properties, pipelines and opportunity stages. Look at what you have and think about how you can map information critical to your sales process.
Understand the holy trinity – persons, companies and opportunities.
Your contacts can be associated with Persons and Companies. That way, you can relate any person you are working with to any Company they work at, or vice-versa. That way, you always see who the employees at a certain company you work with are, their position and what their status is.
The opportunity is basically your potential sale and is related to Persons and/or companies. Opportunity stages allows you to track how opportunities progress through your sales pipeline. Each stage is also assigned a probability which helps you forecast what’s more likely to win.
The stages within pipelines are useful for separating different sales processes. This can be for different product offerings or deal sources.
The sales-pipeline is the heart of your sales process. This is the road, your potential customers walk and in the end, the opportunities result in a WIN or Fail for your company.
Now, the “core” of the issue:
For a B2B SaaS company, the sales process should be set-up something like this:
- First of all you need a database of contacts, that fits your buyer persona (and here you have to be realistic, you will not hit THE right persona right away, it will be more like trial and error).
Once you have it, the contacts will be divided in companies and persons, since you work with both. Now, you import it to Platformax.
“Get rid of your spreadsheets, 1998 was 20 years ago, let’s keep up with time and use modern sales tools and sales platforms”.
Once the contacts and the data are imported, you start with the outreach.
Why outreach?
To find out who is actually interested in your product or service.
- Outreach campaigns in Platformax are divided into (automated and personalized) Email campaigns, and Call campaigns. You can set-up Email campaigns like THIS, or call campaigns like THIS.
- Great! Your Outreach campaigns are now “rolling-out”, or finished.
As a result, you are getting Opportunities back. Some people will tell you “We are interested in what you are offering”, and for you that is a Opportunity, that has to be processed.
How do we process it in a systematic and cool way? With a Sales Pipeline!
- A pipeline is (as mentioned above) a set of steps you need to do, in order to push the opportunity to the WIN – to Close the deal. Steps of the Pipeline are like: Qualification, Offer sent, Negotiation…. Any company can have their own specific pipeline in Platformax. Adapt it to YOUR process like THIS.
NOTE! Keep it simple. Unless you have a VERY LONG and COMPLICATED sales cycle, don’t go over 7 pipeline-steps.
- Pipeline set-up?
Good.
Time to start planning activities. Depending on your process, your account manager or sales rep will do that. Let’s say you sell B2B.
Your sales rep sets-up phone calls, emails, meetings, or whatever your business needs, in order to push the deal forward.
You need to use activities, for moving the Opportunity to different steps in your Pipeline. There are only 2 outcomes. FAIL or MOVE to the next step, closer to winning the Opportunity.
- Now you have 10, 20 or 30 Opportunities in your Pipeline that you can easily control and manage!
Doing that by hand, would not only cost you time, but also lose you money sooner or later, since keeping track of so many tasks is not really manageable with spreadsheets.
- To finish things up, let’s take a look at reporting.
Once set-up, you can see WHY you failed some opportunities, how many days an Opportunity has been worked on and the best part, see how you can improve on that.
You can of course also see which sales rep is most efficient in your team, so your whole group can learn from him/her about specific problems.
That’s it! With these 7 easy steps, you should have no problem setting up your scalable repeatable sales process in Platformax and crushing sales for your company!
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