95 percent of decisions a customer makes are at the subconscious level. Therefore, the dynamics of a sales process not only lie in selling your product or service to the customer but also largely depend on how they feel when they engage with you during this process. You can provide the best experience to your prospects by tailoring your sales process using the steps listed in this blog. Let’s get started.
8 Steps to Design a Winning Sales Process
Step 1: Build Product Knowledge
Product teams and sales experts worked in silos until recently. For instance, if there was a product-specific question that a customer asked a sales rep, potential consumers were directed to a product manager or product expert to answer that question.
However, this workflow model between sales reps and product teams will no longer work. With the influx of information that customers are exposed to, they are expecting sales professionals to answer product-specific questions inside out. Though this is quite a demanding ask, the silver line behind the challenge is it streamlines communication and establishes sales reps as product experts, thereby, helping them handle any kind of objections with confidence.
On this note, the best way to accumulate product knowledge is to review product demos, read press releases and other relevant documentation. Then use this information to create your notes, so that you can resolve your potential customer’s concerns at the get-go.
Step 2: Research Your Ideal Prospect
Today, businesses are creating buyer personas that give them a blueprint of their potential customers’ psychographics, demographics and communication preferences. Personas help sales and marketing teams to up their game when planning how to reach out to their target audience and address their pain points.
If you don’t have buyer personas, here are some questions you can ask to draft your blueprint for the same.
- What buyers’ data do you have that helps identify ideal prospects?
- What unique needs do your products/services address, and who needs them?
- Where do your ideal clients live?
- How do my potential clients respond to businesses like mine?
- What are the optimal characteristics of my competitors’ target audience?
We understand that accumulating this data and gaining insights from them is quite a challenge. However, you can get this information from your CRM tool conveniently. However, acquiring this information becomes easier if your CRM system has in-built analytics tools like Sales Cloud.
Salesforce Sales Cloud helps you understand the history of your sales, where exactly your previous sales came from, the basic demographic information about your buyers and other business details. Also, you can capture information pertaining to the most popular products among your customers, the average buyer purchase frequency, average sales and buying habits of customers.
Step 3: Identify Prospects and Generate Leads
Be it finding the ideal individuals who can purchase your products or identifying key businesses that can become your potential clients, prospecting channelizes your sales process in the right direction. With the power of the Internet and using your personal connections, you can use various ways to identify prospects and generate leads.
From asking your connections for referrals to using social media and other online forums where your prospects are more likely to be active, you can acquire key information about your potential customers. With this information, you can run targeted inbound lead generations campaigns with the help of your marketing team.
Step 4: Qualify Prospects
It’s well-known that not all prospects convert into customers. Therefore, you need to analyze the data about your prospects thoroughly and identify people who are more likely to purchase your products. But the big challenge is how you identify qualified leads.
You can identify qualified leads through qualification calls where you need to get answers to the following questions:
- What are your customers’ needs, and do they align with your product or service offerings?
- How soon does the potential client want to make the purchase? If yes, then what would the tentative timeframe be?
- How much does the prospect need to spend for the product or service you’re offering?
- Who has the final say on the product purchase?
Armed with the answers to these questions, you will be able to identify the prospects with whom you can engage further so that you can close more deals without wasting your time and energy.
Step 5: Analyze Each Prospective Customer’s Needs
Now that you’ve filtered your list of qualified prospects, it’s time to dive deep to understand what each potential client requires, in detail, through a discovery call. Here are some questions you can ask in your discovery call to guide your conversation with your qualified prospect.
- What are the pain points you’re struggling with currently?
- How are these pain points affecting your operations?
- What’s stopping you from identifying and adapting to permanent solutions?
- If you’ve adopted some solutions already, why didn’t they work for you?
- What does a perfect solution look like?
By asking these questions, you’re probing deep into your prospect’s requirements, and as you get answers to these questions, you will have an idea which of your products will resolve their problems.
Step 6: Lead the Sales Call
With these insights at your disposal, you can now schedule a sales call and pitch your product or service offerings to your qualified prospects. A key element to remember during your sales call is to stick to how your product can resolve your prospects’ pain points and not brag about your product features. By sticking to this guideline, you will make your potential customer feel more valued. Also, you need to identify the objections you’re likely to face in a sales call and outline how to handle the same, way before you even get to talk to the prospect.
Step 7: Follow Up and Close the Deal
After the sales call, ensure that you follow up with your prospective client and summarize the entire conversation you had. Also, reiterate the steps that you will take after closing the deal. At this point, the prospect may ask you some additional questions about your product; ensure that you address their concerns and urge them to make a purchase decision on or before the specified date during your sales call. Make this easy by sending them across a PDF contract with a section for their e-signature.
Step 8: Nurture Customer Relationships and Up-sell or Cross-sell
Now that you’re successful in closing the deal, you must try to further strengthen the relationship with your client; explore the possibility to up-sell or cross-sell any other relevant services or products they may need, thereby delivering more value.
Conclusion
Now that you know how the ideal sales process looks like, it’s time you rethink how you gather data to gain the required insights. At Solunus, we help you utilize cutting-edge Salesforce CRM applications to help you make the best use of your data to connect with customers effectively and close deals. Our experts can understand your pain points and chart a strategy to provide the best solutions to help you achieve your business goals.
Hope you liked this post. How do you plan to streamline your sales process? We’d love to know.
About Solunus
Solunus is a dedicated Salesforce partner organization, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Our unrelenting focus on comprehending the unique needs of our clients coupled with our unrivaled expertise of the Salesforce platform enables us to deliver the perfect solutions that create the best value for IT and business analytics firms.
