15
Sales Process
You should never allow someone else to dictate your sales process.
—Mike Weinberg
Jeffrey Gitomer, author of The Little Red Book of Selling (Bard Press, 2004) and his Sales Bible (John Wiley & Sons, new ed., 2015), is one of the most prolific authors in the sales space. He has sold more than a million books and risen to celebrity status in the sales profession. I once walked through the Charlotte, North Carolina, airport with Jeffrey. People were coming up to him from every direction to shake his hand or get an autograph. They were even introducing their children to “The King of Sales.”
In his home is an impressive library, including what is likely the most comprehensive collection of sales books in the world. Whenever I'm there, I find myself staring into the bookshelves, mesmerized, just trying to take it all in.
In the center of the library surrounded by these books is Gitomer's favorite writing chair. And it was there in the library that we engaged in a deep conversation about the sales process.
“Look at all these books.” Gitomer waved at the shelves—school was in session. “There's so much that's been written about sales, but I can simplify all of it. Sales is a process—a completely predictable process. Follow the steps and you close deals. Skip steps and you lose.”
Sales is a process. I'd heard and said those words more times than I could remember. Sales is a process is the mantra of sales trainers, the hero and main character of countless sales books, and a shape-shifting chameleon that takes on different forms, labels, acronyms, and layers as the complexity and length of the sales cycle increases.
The burning question is why, after all the investment that companies have made teaching salespeople the sales process, do salespeople ignore it and skip steps?
It is a linear, logical process that, when fully leveraged, guarantees a higher win probability. It just doesn't make sense to ignore it, which is why, if you drive around to the back of office buildings, you'll find rows of sales managers banging their foreheads against the bricks.
There are four reasons salespeople fail to effectively leverage the sales process:
- Disruptive emotions
- Winging it
- Complexity
- No sales process
Disruptive Emotions Disrupt the Sales Process
You don't need me or anyone else to lecture you on the steps of the sales process and what they mean. Most salespeople are familiar with the sales process, are aware that the sales process is important, and understand the consequences of skipping steps.
Most sales organizations have defined and perfected a simple, easy-to-execute sales process with steps that are appropriate to their sales cycle and product complexity. These organizations also provide sales process training programs for their salespeople.
Yet many talented, educated, well-trained salespeople consistently crash and burn in the sales process (go back to that image of sales managers banging their heads against brick walls).
The problem is not logical, and it's not a training problem—it's emotional.
The most frequent reason salespeople fail in the sales process is the inability to regulate and manage disruptive emotions. These disruptive emotions, including impatience, fear, desperation, eagerness, doubt, hope, insecurity, ego, and more, impede situational awareness, causing salespeople to ignore, skip, or mangle steps in the sales process.
The lack of self-control is the most fundamental reason why salespeople fail in the sales process and lower win probabilities. They push too hard, lose control, overestimate win probability, talk over prospects, and, far too often, skip steps.
Where ultra-high performers (UHPs) separate themselves from the masses of average salespeople is their ability to marry intellectual understanding of the linear sales process with sales-specific emotional intelligence.
Winging It
Gitomer is right. Sales outcomes are predictable based on how salespeople leverage, execute, and move deals through the sales process. Follow a well-designed sales process with qualified prospects that are in the buying window, and you will close more deals. It's the truth and it's a guarantee.
Sadly, many salespeople discount this basic truth and wing it because they, in the words of one poor performer, “I don't like to be constrained by rules.” These salespeople prefer to chart their own course, in the delusional belief that their way is better. Trust me. It's not. Winging it is stupid.
Ultra-high performers prepare in advance for sales calls. Pre-call planning can be as simple as doing a little bit of research and scratching down some notes when working short-cycle, low-complexity deals, or as extensive as developing detailed stakeholder profiles and tying preplanning into a comprehensive account sales strategy with complex deals.
Regardless of account complexity, there are four basic pre-call planning questions you need to answer before each sales call:
- What do you already know, including information you can find without asking your prospect?
- What do you want to know or learn in your meeting?
- What is your meeting objective?
- What is your targeted next step?
These questions should be asked and answered prior to every meeting with a stakeholder.
What You Already Know
Anthony's company helps employers hire top-tier talent with hiring assessments. When Anthony and his team were courting a large furniture seller, they shopped the company first. “We went into the store and took in the entire experience. By posing as customers we learned about their sales process, the types of people they hire, and their culture.”
Anthony continued, “When we showed up for our initial discovery meeting, we explained to the stakeholder group what we had done. They were beyond impressed that we'd invested time to get to know them. You could feel the emotional shift in the room. We walked in as salespeople and out as partners. Today, they are one of our largest customers.”
Learn everything possible about the organization and the people you are meeting with in advance. Leverage technology, social media, and the Internet to gather information about stakeholders and their organizations. This has four benefits.
- It helps you avoid asking stupid questions that demonstrate your lack of preparation.
- It helps you craft easy questions that get your stakeholder talking.
- You begin learning to speak your prospect's language.
- It makes your stakeholder feel important because you provide tangible evidence that you cared enough to invest effort in getting to know them.
Through preplanning and strategy, UHPs develop theories and hypotheses that can be tested through questioning.
What You Want to Know
Throughout the sales process you are tasked with building the case for why the prospect's stakeholders should choose you and your product. This case begins and ends with discovery. Each time you meet with a stakeholder, your objective is to gather information that helps you put this puzzle together.
Before your call, you must have a clear understanding of what you want to learn. This is how you define your call objective. Once you have determined what you want or need to know, in order to move to the next step, develop and practice the questions you will ask during your meeting.
Meeting Objectives and Targeted Next Steps
Every sales call should have a simple and easy-to-explain objective so that both you and your stakeholder know why you are there and what you hope to accomplish. Your objective should be aligned with where you are in the sales process.
Likewise, you should have a clearly defined, targeted next step aligned to the sales process. Before you go into any meeting with a stakeholder, ask and answer two questions.
- What's my objective?
- What's my targeted next step?
If you can't definitively answer these questions, you'll be winging it and wasting their time, and the probability that you'll walk out of your meeting without a next step will be high.
Complexity Is the Enemy of Execution
Sometimes sales organizations create complexity in the sales process where there should be simplicity. This happens for two primary reasons:
- The leadership team (or worse, a committee of people) breaks the process into far too many steps—usually in an effort to manage and measure the pipeline to the nth degree inside the customer relationship management (CRM) system. In their quest for data and visibility, they unknowingly hinder their sales organization, handcuff their salespeople, and steal time from high-value sales activities.
- The organization, in an effort to be truly unique, creates complicated “business-speak” labels for the sales process steps that make no earthly sense to normal human beings except MBAs from big-money B-schools.
Recently I was interviewing a sales rep about his company's sales process in preparation for a keynote speech. This company invests heavily in sales training and is very proud of its unique sales process. Yet the rep said to me, when I asked him to walk me though the steps, “Hold on, I think there is a poster in the conference room with the steps on it.”
What do you think the chance is that this rep is executing the process effectively in the field? Complexity only serves to befuddle salespeople.
Some people feel a need to create complexity out of simplicity because they believe it makes them look smarter. They cannot accept that simple works.
It's a lot easier to make simple things complex than to make complex things simple. Steve Jobs famously said, “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Complexity is the enemy of execution. Real genius is making the complex simple.
No Sales Process
To be fair, there is another group of salespeople who've never been taught to follow a defined sales process or don't have a sales process. This problem primarily affects independent sales professionals, sole proprietors, and salespeople working for small companies and start-ups that lack a functioning sales training infrastructure.
There is a basic Seven-Step Sales Process (Figure 15.1) that applies to virtually every sales situation, product, service, and industry. Yes, there may be different substeps or monikers, but from my work with some of the largest and most successful sales organizations, I've found that their sales processes are all built on this seven-step foundation.
Figure 15.1 Seven-Step Sales Process
Prospecting and Qualifying
Every sales process begins with top-of-funnel sales-development activity. Ultra-high performers are fanatical prospectors that relentlessly and systematically engage and move the most qualified high-probability prospects into the pipeline when the buying window opens.
The key to effective prospecting is a balanced approach that leverages multiple prospecting channels, including the phone, e-mail, social, in-person, networking, and referrals, to connect with prospects at the right time and with the right message.
For a deeper dive into prospecting and demand generation, read Fanatical Prospecting.
Connecting
In most sales training programs and sales process diagrams, this step is referred to as “building rapport.” This step is focused primarily on building emotional connections with the various stakeholders involved in the buying process.
In the context of the sales process, the connecting step is generally the initial meeting with a stakeholder. Your focus is on lowering emotional barriers, setting the agenda, defining the sales and buying process, gaining control, and qualifying.
The connecting step is where you and your stakeholders decide if it makes sense to move to the next step and invest time in the sales and buying process.
Stakeholders will want to move forward if you've built enough interest and credibility to compel them to invest more time with you. You will want to move forward if you feel your win probability is high enough to justify a next step and further investment of time and resources.
Discovery
Discovery is the process of building your case. It's about asking questions and listening. Often called fact finding or needs analysis, discovery is the most important step in the sales process and where 80 percent or more of your time should be spent.
Discovery is the heart of the sales process. Depending on the complexity of the deal, discovery may last a few minutes or span many months and meetings with a broad array of stakeholders.
During discovery, ultra-high performers are patient and strategic, methodically building their case with powerful questions that shake stakeholders from their comfort zones. They leverage strategic, artful, provocative, and challenging questions to create self-awareness in stakeholders for the need to change.
Except for putting the right deals into the pipeline in the first place, nothing you do in the sales process has a greater impact on win probability than effective discovery.
Bridging
To build a rock-solid case for doing business with you, you must build a bridge from your offerings, recommendations, or solutions to your stakeholder's unique pain, problems, and opportunities.
In the context of a sales conversation (including demos) informal bridges give your prospect a compelling reason to move forward to the next step. When closing, bridging is accomplished through a formal presentation or proposal. In most sales process diagrams this is called presenting.
Ultra-high performers differentiate by creating personalized recommendations and bridging from solutions to their stakeholder's problems, using the stakeholder's language rather than their own.
Asking
Asking is a core discipline of sales. If you don't ask, you don't get. In most sales process diagrams this step is called closing. I prefer asking because asking for what you want is the key.
Over the course of the sales process you'll be asking for micro-commitments. These micro-commitments are the small steps that move your deal forward through the sales process. Once you've made your final case, you'll ask for the sale.
There are no tricks or secret techniques. Ultra-high sales performers find asking is easy because they have earned the right to ask.
Because they've systematically followed the sales process, developed emotional connections with stakeholders, asked questions and listened, built relevant bridges, and thus increased win probability, their confidence in getting a yes is high.
The art is situational awareness and emotional control—knowing when to ask, how to ask, what to ask for, and when you've earned the right to ask.
Objections and Negotiating
Stakeholders are going to hit you with objections. They will negotiate. It is a fact of life. Even in perfect situations with all the ducks in a row, you will still be hit with challenging questions and need to work out win-win compromises.
Average salespeople succumb to disruptive emotions, often at the first hint of pushback. Rather than negotiate, they give discounts. Rather than working through objections, they acquiesce and leave the playing field.
Ultra-high performers embrace objections and negotiation. They recognize that when a stakeholder is throwing out objections or negotiating, that person is engaged. The more engaged the stakeholder, the higher the win probability.
Implementation and Account Management
Depending on the responsibilities of your sales role, you may be involved in the delivery or implementation of your product or service and/or managing and growing the account.
Flawless implementation is the key to getting testimonials that bolster credibility and referrals that are often your best-qualified prospects.
Effective account management is the key to retaining hard-fought business and growing highly profitable revenue.
Average salespeople take on the entire burden themselves and get bogged down in the minutiae of implementation and account management, leaving them with little time for selling. Ultra-high performers leverage their support teams to back them up and take care of customers. They thereby gain more time to focus on high-value activities that increase their income.
Aligning the Three Processes of Sales
Mastery of the sales process alone, regardless of how you choose to define and practice it, is not enough for ultra-high performance. Salespeople who master the sales process intellectually and emotionally can still fall short. This is because they become too myopic inside the sales process and lose sight of the bigger picture—aligning the three processes of sales.
| Sales Process | Buying Process | Decision Process |
| Your defined process for selling Linear Organizational Measured Inflexible Impacted by disruptive emotions |
Your prospect's defined process for buying Formal or informal Linear Organizational Unique Measured and objective Shaped with strategy |
Stakeholders' process for deciding Emotional Nonlinear Individual Irrational Influenced through human interaction |
When these processes are aligned, serendipity happens. Yet they are almost never aligned, because salespeople—as conditioned by trainers—focus almost exclusively on their own self-centric process designed to move (and in the worst cases manipulate) prospects from one point to the next.
Ultra-high performers see the bigger picture beyond the sales process and focus on aligning the three processes of sales. This is the real secret to increasing win probability and making sales outcomes predictable.