In this webinar, Justin Michael, RVP Sales at YOUAPPI and XANT CEO David Boyce provide tips for managers and reps to keep momentum during the coronavirus pandemic but focusing on three key principles. keep momentum COVID

RELATED: How To Lead From Home

In this article:

1. 1. 1. Meet the Speakers
      2. The Current Situation
      3. Hire for Agility in Industry Shifts
      4. How to Build the Digital Relationship
         
      5. Key Points
      6. Further Information and Support

Ideas for Remote Sales Managers and Reps

Meet the Speakers keep momentum COVID

Justin Michael scales tech companies and is a lifetime revenue leader. You may know Justin from his LinkedIn videos, or from sending 1 million emails to different startup businesses!
“YouAppi is a leading performance-based mobile app marketing and retargeting platform for premium app publishers and brands. From user acquisition to retention via app retargeting and re-engagement, the company delivers a comprehensive range of mobile marketing solutions to grow your business at every stage of the funnel.”  keep momentum coronavirus

The Current Situation keep momentum COVID

As we work from home, we are trying to figure out the new reality.

Part of that has been to work out how to make a professional life that is being conflated with our home life. How should you deal with this new reality in terms of sales?

The shift has been major; salespeople are sheltered in place, working hard to carry on as usual, but now people are wondering why they hadn’t ramped up their remote working practices before this crisis.

Some parts of the economy are still growing, and it’s an excellent opportunity to be more responsible and drive new revenue.

Call connects are high in some industries, but contacts are much more distracted. What is essential is to be more careful about what you do at that moment. A good tactic is not to try and close meetings but to dialogue sequences, and spark interaction.

RELATED: How To Manage A Sales Team While You Work From Home

Focus on Three Principles – Humanize, Personalize, Empathize

Interestingly, and paradoxically, because we’re all forced into this separation mode, we actually have to be more human because we can’t meet face to face right now.

And so, think about humanizing your messaging, like you would if you met someone face to face. What would you do in the real world and translate that to the virtual world?

Look at your prospect’s profile, and consider mentioning links or pick out something pertinent to them to be ahead of the game.

Be empathetic by tailoring how you connect with others. For example, the travel industry is severely impacted, so pull back and retarget different businesses.

To start off interactions, ask people how they are or how they’ve been impacted.

We have shifted from very clinical connections to more personalized ones. Although it takes longer, it’s more personalized and sincere. The intent of the communication is important, and you need to be genuine with how you humanize, personalize, and empathize to build connections.

A proper technique could be to share your own story, how events are impacting you, and then dovetailing that into questions about the prospect.

RELATED: 14 Helpful Tips For Working From Home While Social Distancing

How to Build the Digital Relationship

Your first-degree network is way bigger than you think, but it can be challenging to see. Use a sales navigator and search worldwide to mine your first-degree connections.
Talk a little bit about our communities and be natural. Just think about running into a person at the grocery store or a networking event. Think about what you would do and then do this over a channel—for example, email, phone, text, WhatsApp, Messenger.
You could go as far as calling your clients and ask them how they are and ask if you can do anything to make things easier, like a health check. Make sure this is nothing to do with closing business (unless the client leads that conversation).
Use open questions or illumination questions to get your clients to open up and talk. Don’t be too personal or overstep either. Keep your question sensible and have finesse – don’t over ask, just open the conversation, and let clients share their thoughts if they want to.
Use video platforms to get your face seen as much as possible in a more human way.
Understand Your Client’s Needs – Make deposits, not withdrawals right now. I.e., build the relationship and knowledge base to make withdrawals later. keep momentum COVID
Utilize Your Network – Utilize your robust LinkedIn network and using the three principles. Try LinkedIn voicemail drops to all your first degree connections that are relevant. You can record LinkedIn videos, or you could use third-party platforms to do this.
Get New Content – Ask your marketing teams for content to engage clients, even if you write it. For example, this could be blogs or YouTube content, news, diagrams, visual illustrations, graphs regarding COVID-19 effects. Start organic dialogues where the zoom naturally occurs at the back of these.
There’s an urgency to drive business right now because things are very volatile. But if you can be disciplined enough to give something away, to go for the dialogue, not the meeting, then your clients will become curious and interested.

Key Points keep momentum COVID

• • Conversations are still happening, but it is more relevant now to have empathy, to be personalized, and to be human. 
  • Rethink your sequences, target better, and be more empathetic in the way that you create those messages. 
  • If you’re doing something manually, which is well personalized, you can automate it, and it can be just as effective if you do it right.
  • Look for prospects on different platforms, Omni channels, and reach out in novel ways.
  • Lean a little bit more into personal phone calls, a little bit more into one on one interactions and make sure that you’re human first.
  • Make your deposits not withdrawals during this time when everyone is worrying. 
  • So, we do not have to step back from having conversations with customers. We just must have personalization. Humanization and empathy as we do it.
  • Sales leaders don’t necessarily need to change KPIs or performance reviews, just rethink them. Wins can include having warm dialogues with the right customers and Q3 planning.

Further Information and Support

In these challenging times, Justin Michael is giving away a free digital copy of his book “TQ-Technology Quotient: How to Achieve Superhuman Sales Engagement Skills.” Just inbox him via LinkedIn.

XANT is offering Playbook software for free during the pandemic crisis to help people while they figure out how to work better remotely; head to XANT Cares. 

You can also head to our website to find out further advice on how to work from home better.

How do you humanize, personalize, and empathize? What successes have you had? Please share your ideas below.

Up Next:

• • How To Comp Sales Teams In A Crisis
  • 15 Sales Management Software and CRMs Used By Sales Teams
  • 7 Ways To Increase Operational Efficiency

Last week, while working from my new office, aka my dining/living room, I saw a man walking down the other side of the street whom I didn’t recognize. Mind you, I don’t know all my neighbors, or truth be told have an interest in knowing all my neighbors, but there was something about him that screamed “outsider” and my interest was piqued.

Before too long, the “outsider” knocked on my door and within 1.5 seconds I knew he was selling something. Normally I would have “no-thanks’d” the guy before the three second mark, but something made me pause.

In my role at work, I talk about sales best practices every day and my Sales System (located next to my Nervous and Respiratory Systems) were ring-a-ding-dinging.

“I noticed you don’t have a screen on your front window” he said as he backed up six feet, which I appreciated because right now I don’t want to be within 6 feet of my own mother let alone a stranger. And it’s true, I have been studiously ignoring that missing screen for the last four seasons. BUT HE NOTICED. Then he started asking me about the current state of my windows. Yes, the guy was selling new windows in the midst of a pandemic.

After reviewing the conversation and analyzing the experience, I’ve determined that three things are happening here. One, there’s a door-to-door sales rep out there working really hard to make a sale by way of human connection, and he’s not letting a stay-at-home order get in his way. Two, which is most surprising, I was a thousand times more receptive to that human interaction than I normally would be. And three, I really need to replace my screen.

Report Card for the Sales Rep

• A+ – for getting out there and not giving up. You have a very steep road ahead of you with the projected recession. Starting now to build your pipeline will “flatten the curve” but you will still have to fight for every deal and every dollar.
• A+ – for making the pitch about me. I’m not interested in a fake smile and polished recitation of your products. I have problems, thank you for being the one to offer a solution.
• B+ – for the personal connection on my doorstep. Even if it was six feet away, you were still on my doorstep and I’m paranoid about my private space more than ever. Next time, try a personalized video in an email.
• F – for follow-through. You know where I live, but you didn’t ask for my contact info. How can you follow up with me? When I’m ready to buy I may not go through the hassle of tracking you down, which is too bad because your first impression was…impressive.

Report Card for Humanity/Buyer/Me

• A+ – for personal and buyer awareness. We all need to be on the lookout for scams and germs more than ever, but it is a delicate balance between paranoia and prudent caution. The best thing to do is ask questions. Ask about the history of a sellers’ company and their proposed future. Ask about contingency plans. Ask for direct contact info for multiple people at the company and follow that up with an actual call or email. Read the fine print!
• A+ – (Most Improved) for genuinely caring about your fellow human beings. Yes, it’s a scary time right now, but there’s a lot of honest good will going on around the world. And unlike the October – December Holiday Season “good will”, it wasn’t scheduled or pre-empted by retail sales. We are much more cognizant that every purchase we make could impact someone in our community losing or keeping their job. (Write a Holiday song about that!) Being open to human interactions could be caused by the pandemic or working from home in isolation but either way, great job on being a human.
• F – for FEAR. Even though I looked at that man and for once didn’t see him as an interchangeable sales rep, I was still influenced by fear of the unknown.

Failing at Follow-through and Fear

It’s true, I asked the questions and I took the business card, but I have not committed to the sale yet because I’m afraid of the unknown. Caution isn’t going to fix my windows and when I’m ready to pull my head out of the sand will that Sales Rep be the first person I call? Did we make a true human connection? That is what sales teams should aim for to weather this storm.

Your products solve problems that will still be there after this pandemic passes. The question is, will you still be there when I’m ready to sign on the dotted line or am I one of a thousand vague interactions?

Author
Janae Galindo
Business Enablement Manager | XANT

RELATED: 7 Most Common Mistakes In Sales Process Mapping And How To Avoid Them

In this article:

1. A Business Needs to Have a Sales Process Map
2. What Is a Sales Process?
3. Sales Process vs Sales Methodology
4. Types of Sales Methodology
5. Seven Steps for Sales Process Mapping
6. Other Tips for Mapping Your Sales Process

Sales Process Mapping | Carve Your Path to Sales Success with These 7 Steps

A Business Needs to Have a Sales Process Map

I performed sales process mapping for years. In fact, I helped map the sales process for over 200 clients in my time.

I know you’re going to hate me for this, but there’s one thing I learned throughout this experience: you can’t escape doing sales mapping. You need to map your sales process.

In all the consulting I did, I had only three companies show me a detailed sales process map. Yes, just three out of hundreds.

It’s actually shocking to know most companies don’t have or have yet to develop sales process steps for mapping and other crucial revenue-generating activities.

Most sales leaders don’t realize their sales system is actually a collection of multiple processes. Some may even have just a simplistic view about it.

These executives may think it’s as straightforward as making a product, marketing it, and then selling it to different market segments.

Sales process mapping is one of the most effective visualization tools sales executives can use to see both the big picture and the intricacies of each step. It helps you understand the real flow of their sales process in a structured manner.

Through this, leaders can then identify gaps and other challenges in their sales performance. Sales territory mapping can also help organizations establish their sales methodology and improve sales process steps.

A sales mapping tool can help companies find a solution that drives improved results.

What Is a Sales Process?

Before we get into mapping the sales process steps, let’s first determine what it is exactly.

Sales process basically refers to the steps sales professionals follow from prospecting to closing a deal with a customer. By establishing a structured sales process to follow, turning a prospect into a closed client becomes easier to do for salespeople.

Throughout the buying process for a product or service, sales reps make decisions by following the system established through mapping proper sales work.

There are five steps in the sales process:

1. Prospecting – Lead generation happens in this step when sales teams look for possible customers to help work through the sales process. Sourcing may happen through online searches, attending events, or networking at conferences.
2. Connecting – Sales reps then go through the prospect list gathered and makes initial connections to these people. The decision to continue with the sales process steps for every potential client happens here.
3. Researching – Once the company’s product or service is established as relevant to the potential customer’s needs, the sales rep begins researching to create a more tailored sales experience for the client.
4. Presenting – Presentations should be given to more serious prospects, as a result of research done on the customer’s needs. Sales teams should refrain from presenting to a new customer since that may end up as a waste of time for both parties.
5. Closing – Any activities contributing to the closing of a deal falls in this step. This step is concluded with signed contracts or payments made and is mutually beneficial to both the sales organization and the customer.

Sales Process vs Sales Methodology

It’s also important to differentiate the sales process and sales methodology before mapping out your sales system.

While concrete and specific steps geared towards closing a deal make up the sales process, sales methodology refers to the general framework to be followed for how the processes should be laid out.

How your team proceeds with their work depend on the sales methodology your company employs to reach your overall sales goals. It guides the decision-making process of the sales team from the sales manager down to the sales reps.

Types of Sales Methodology

Companies employ these sales methodologies to streamline every buyer’s journey according to the processes established.

1. Challenger Sales Methodology – Sales reps figure out the challenges a prospective customer faces and offer tools or services to solve these issues.
2. Consultative Selling – The sales rep builds trust with the client over time, which may result in possible repeat business with existing buyers.
3. Sandler Sales Methodology – Both the sales rep and a prospective customer invest an equal amount of time in the process so issues are raised and resolved early.
4. Solution Selling – As the name suggests, this methodology focuses on the solution the product can offer to the client’s problem or needs, instead of the product itself.
5. Inbound Selling – This method attracts a potential customer by tailoring marketing materials with relevant content instead of random creative adverts.

Seven Steps for Sales Process Mapping

Is sales mapping difficult? In reality, it’s not, but often for sales leaders, this concept proves to be a tough exercise.

When it comes to mapping out your sales process, there are seven basic steps:

1. Understand the Process Stages That Make Up Your Sales Organization

Creating a sales process map to refine the sales process

Sales organizations are becoming a complex system of different functions. Gone are the days when a single sales rep does all the prospecting, closing, and managing of accounts.

The new model of selling focuses on specialization. Team members perform a specific functional role, which they manage individually.

XANT data shows companies that effectively specialize experience a 7% higher close rate than companies that do not. Specialization is the new model of sales, and it’s time to embrace it.

Here are a few examples of sales structures with companies we’ve worked with:

One company has a marketing department that generates leads. It then sends those leads to a team of lead development reps.

Those lead development reps qualify leads. They send them to either an inside sales team or an outside sales team this company calls “business development.”

Now, the business development or sales team does a lot of their own prospecting by utilizing third-party lists.

There’s another step before closing a deal. It involves several teams, including the:

• Underwriting team
• Legal team
• Customer Management or Customer Service team

The Five Questions to Ask About the Stages of Your Business

As you begin to understand the stages of your business, make sure you answer the following five questions:

• Stages — What functional roles does my company have in its sales structure?
• Goal — What are the primary goals of this role?
• Manager — Who manages or leads this team?
• Location — Where are these functional roles located?
• Reps — What is the total number of reps in each team or function?

Once you understand the different functional areas, you need to determine how you’re going to create a current state process map.

2. Define a Structure for Sales Mapping

People get lost in what software they should use to create a process map.

Some popular sales mapping tools include:

• Pencil and paper
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Lucid Charts (free)
• Other free or paid programs

When it comes to the shapes, there is a whole list of choices to use in process mapping exercises. If you’re a salesperson like the rest of us, you want to do it quick and simple.

For this reason, I recommend you start with these basic shapes:

• Rectangle: Action
• Diamond: Decision
• Rounded Rectangle: Start/stop
• Arrow: Connection
• Small empty boxes to make notes or highlight a number associated with a process: Note or number

Of course, you’re free to designate these shapes to other types of processes. What’s important is they’re easy to understand and follow.

Once you’ve determined the appropriate shapes for your process map, you need a structure to start inserting your shapes into.

We’ve tested multiple approaches, but the one that stuck breaks down the sales process into three key areas:

• Lead/List Acquisition — Where you get things
• Contacting Cadence — What you do
• Qualification and Close — How you finish

3. Map the Current State Process

It’s now time to begin mapping the current state process.

In this step, you need to gather the necessary information, which can be done through a series of questions.

It can be through individual stakeholder interviews. It’s important to target the key individuals who represent the different functional areas in your business.

These questions don’t need to be long or complex. It can be as simple as asking them their daily step-by-step sales process.

Here are a few examples of roles and questions you can ask:

Demand Generation: 

• How many different lead sources do you have, and what are they?
• Are you appending or enriching leads and lists as they come through your system?
• How do you route or assign leads from different lead sources?

Sales Development:

• How do you structure your sales development team? Do you have a response team, outbound team, vertical, product, etc.?
• How does a rep prioritize leads?
• What is the contacting strategy for sales development reps?
• Here is our numbers question: how many activities does the average rep do per person per day?

Sales:

• How does the sales team generate new business?
• Once the sales team owns the prospect, what is their strategy and process to close the deal?
• What are the opportunity stages sales reps follow to close deals?
• Here is our numbers question: What is the average sales cycle?

Customer Success:

• How does the sales team generate new business?
• Once the sales team owns the prospect, what is their strategy and process to close the deal?
• What are the opportunity stages sales reps follow to close deals?
• Here is our numbers question: What is the average retention percentage per rep?

When you ask these questions, you should be able to complete the necessary information to map out a step-by-step process map.

You may feel these are a lot of questions. Let me give you a visualization then. Here is an example of a sales process workflow chart from Lucid.

RELATED: 4 Simple Questions That Will Transform Your Sales Process

4. Review the Current State for Strengths and Opportunities

Reviewing a sales process map for accuracy

Once your process map is complete, you can review it for strengths. You can also identify areas of opportunity.

From these, you can begin making a plan for a future state.

What are the different sales and opportunities? Here is an example you can identify in a sales development organization:

• Strengths: use of marketing automation, lead statuses structure in place, submit opportunity function added to Salesforce
• Opportunities: batch time should be under five minutes or immediate, auto-routing leads with the CRM, response time needs to be under one hour

5. Create a Future State Process Map

Remember, earlier, I mentioned it’s essential companies have a sales map? Let me explain why you need to have this ability.

Once you identify strengths and opportunities in your current process, you can recreate your process in a future state. You can then identify opportunities and represent them in an ideal form.

Here is an example future state process map:

• Work to get our batch time down to five minutes.
• Build routing within our CRM.
• Push to get a one-hour response time.
• Structure a follow-up strategy to include three calls, three voicemails, and three emails.

6. Implement a Governance Structure to Periodically Manage and Improve Your Sales Process

The first five steps should do more than acquaint you with sales mapping. They must let you make one now.

The job is not over, though. One important step is periodic management.

Once your sales process map is complete, make a periodic follow-up. This follow-up should review the process.

It will let you see if some parts of the process already broke down. In other words, they are no longer working.

With a strong governance structure for a sales acceleration project in place, this is not difficult. If that does not exist, you’ll need to create some form of a governance structure.

A steering committee of sales leaders and sales operations personnel should review the sales process every quarter. They can determine the types of decay and delays present.

Sales operations should own the sales process. They can function as the operations committee.

Sales leadership, meanwhile, should guide the strategy on the steering committee.

Do you want to know the other benefit of sales mapping? This process is similar to creating a product roadmap.

7. Apply the Improved Sales Process Map

Once you’ve finished all the steps listed above, it’s time to apply the changes and see how it works for your organization. Since there’s a new set of metrics in place, the entire sales team needs to be re-trained.

Although you might not end up perfecting your sales process after doing sales process mapping, it doesn’t mean you should hesitate and not apply the changes.

If you don’t set this new process in place, then you wouldn’t know which areas to dial down on and which areas to improve.

Other Tips for Mapping Your Sales Process

1. Use the Customer Journey as Reference

When mapping out the steps during sales mapping, it’s best that you use the customer journey map as a reference. In that way, your sales team is aligned with whatever it is that prospects need during the sales cycle.

Each of your prospects might have differing needs for each step of the way so you should consider that when mapping out your sales process.

2. Include Everyone Involved in the Sales Process

Ask yourself this question: during your entire sales cycle, from sales prospecting to customer retention efforts, is your sales team the only department involved within the organisation?

Of course not, right? This is why should include other stakeholders in sales mapping.

To create a truly accurate sales mapping reference, make sure that you’re in tune with all of the people you involved in the sales process.

3. Make Sure the Steps Aren’t Too Specific nor Too Vague

When crafting the steps for your sales mapping experience, make sure that you don’t focus too much on the smallest details of the sales process. To be able to get good insights from your sales mapping efforts, you should be able to look at the big picture instead of getting lost in the details.

Also, don’t make the steps too ambiguous either. Otherwise, no one would be able to understand exactly what to do at a specific step of the map.

4. Map Your Sales Process and Not the Other Way Around

Instead of trying to accommodate your sales process into a specific type of map, you shouldn’t water down your sales process just because you think it’s too long or too short. Be accurate in your assessments.

Your sales mapping efforts are so you can see things as objectively as possible. Tweaking your sales map to fit the process you want won’t really help.

5. Use a Sales Mapping Tool to Be More Efficient

There are many ways you can be more efficient when mapping out your sales process. One of them is by incorporating sales mapping software.

With the help of a process mapping tool, you’d be able to see which actions lead to better sales and which still need improvement.

Aside from that, a process mapping tool can help you keep a better eye on key metrics so you can get a better insight into your sales process.

It’s possible to create a sales structure for your team fast. I do hope you take the time to map the sales process. You will not regret it.

Does your company perform sales mapping? Share your sales process steps in the comments section below.

Up Next: 

• 5 SaaS Sales Principles To Boost Performance
• Sales Development Action Plan For 2019
• What Is A Sales Plan? | How To Create Your Own + Sample Sales Plan Template

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on May 14, 2018, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.

Learn call planning best practices from Jeff Boyle of Cision and find out why you should never skip this part of the sales call process.

RELATED: How To Optimize Your Sales Process Top To Bottom

In this article:

1. Why Pre-Call Planning Is Important
2. Pre-Call Planning Objectives
3. Is 15 Minutes Enough for Sales Call Planning?
4. The Pre-Call Planning Process
5. How Your Pre-Call Preparation Benefits the Sales Process
6. Pre-Call Planning Mistakes to Avoid
7. Key Takeaway

How to Do Sales Call Planning Effectively

Jeff Boyle is the Senior Director of New Business at Cision. Their company offers public relations and communication software, and they connect their clients with social influencers fit for their brand.

He started his sales career with Corporate Executive Board and now, he’s been with Cision for 12 years.

He began in the industry as a sales rep. Boyle has since then moved up to become a Manager, Director, and now a Senior Director.

The three managers under his team work with small and mid-market sectors. He also handles five enterprise sales reps who focus on Fortune 1000 companies.

Why Pre-Call Planning Is Important

Boyle is a sales leader who spends time with his managers and reps and listens to sales calls. In doing so, he realized that his sales reps were asking prospects questions they should already know the answers to.

Sales leaders often focus on things like forecasting, pipeline, and KPIs. On the other hand, frontline managers spend a lot of their time putting out fires.

As a result, pre-call planning always gets pushed aside, and the importance of sales call planning is not emphasized. Boyle admitted that he noticed this happening to his own sales team.

The fact of the matter is, it’s very important to start off a sales call knowing what you’re getting yourself into.

Pre-Call Planning Objectives

While pre-call planning is essential, Boyle warned against spending too much time on it when there are other revenue-generating activities you also need to focus on.

As a sales leader, you can coach your reps to follow a template, blueprint, or checklist which consist of the following:

• What information they should look for
• How long they should spend on each step of the pre-call planning process
• Indicators that tell them when it’s time to move on

Boyle recommended having a checklist that sales reps can accomplish within 15 minutes. The main point is to make sure the reps are doing their homework before going into a sales call.

At Cision, Boyle and his team use Salesforce as their CRM system, and they document everything there. Sales reps can use the notes left in the CRM for pre-call preparation and even throughout the sales process.

Is 15 Minutes Enough for Sales Call Planning?

Boyle clarified that the preparation time could vary, depending on the kind of opportunity the sales rep tackles. Tenured reps, for instance, are more experienced so they can tell good opportunities from bad ones.

The important thing is that sales reps don’t wing a call.

With the 15-minute time limit, you’re not overkilling or overcomplicating planning the initial sales call and approach. As Boyle said, too much pre-call preparation can also become a disadvantage.

You can break down the pre-call steps within 15 minutes as they’re very straightforward. It’s not rocket science, but where people fail is in the execution.

Everyone knows it’s important, and they should always do it. Yet for some reason, they don’t allot enough time to prepare for their sales calls.

The Pre-Call Planning Process

Boyle shared with us the five-step pre-call planning process his team follows. The process may vary per industry, but as mentioned earlier, the steps are straightforward so you can use this as a template for your own team:

1. Research the Contact and Their Company

The first step, which you should do no matter what, is to research your prospect and their company. There are so many resources you can use to gather information on your contact, such as their company website and LinkedIn.

In the first two to four or three to five minutes, get to know your contact and their company.

Visit their website and check out the “About Us” tab to learn their story and values. From there, you can determine how your business aligns with their corporate vision.

For Cision, the website’s News and Blog parts are very important as these cover their industry. Boyle shared that their sales reps normally research this information:

• Is the prospect pushing out content?
• Are they writing content on their blog?
• Are they creating white papers?
• How are they generating buzz and driving traffic back to their website?

Boyle also recommended researching the company’s leadership. Figure out who the buyers and decision-makers are so you can bring them up during the call.

The hardest part is trying to figure out who you should be talking to. That is why researching the contact, their title, and their company are important.

A lot of times, sales reps aren’t speaking directly to the decision-makers. What they can do is plant the seed on those decision-makers through their contact.

2. Check Your CRM System

While listening to his team’s sales calls, Boyle noticed that his reps kept asking prospects similar questions:

• Have you ever heard of Cision?
• Were you able to get a chance to look at Cision before?
• Have you ever reviewed Cision before?

This made him realize that it’s important to go into your CRM system and look at past notes. You need to refer to previous notes to answer these important questions about your prospect:

• Was your prospect involved in another sales process?
• Why didn’t they come on board with your company?
• Why didn’t they buy? / What derailed them from buying?

Boyle emphasized that finding the answers to these questions are very important. You should also figure out the source of the lead so you can tailor your pitch accordingly.

RELATED: Mapping The Sales Process: 6 Steps For Success

3. Explore the Contact’s LinkedIn Page

The next step is to explore the contact’s LinkedIn page. Following this step in your pre-call planning gives you more insight into the landscape you’re dealing with.

In their LinkedIn page, you can find out what their current role is and see if they got promoted.

You can even view what their past experiences were in other companies. LinkedIn also recommends related profiles, and often, these are their teammates and bosses.

This way, you learn not only about the contact but also their whole team.

4. Competitor Overview

Boyle admitted that he’s big on conducting a competitor overview pre-call. It’s important to find out who the prospect’s competitors are because it builds credibility.

It’s also extremely beneficial if you’re going to name-drop current customers you have that happen to be their competitors. This piques their interest — they’re going to want to know about your company and how their competitors are using your services.

5. Plan for the Call

After gathering all the information you need, the last step is to plan for the call. You can now formulate the questions you want to ask, such as pertinent information you weren’t able to find out from the research.

Remember to jot down your notes and questions, so you can refer to them during the call.

There are many different ways you can form your checklist, but it all boils down to the execution.

How Your Pre-Call Preparation Benefits the Sales Process

If you’re in the inside sales industry, the main purpose why you’re doing pre-call planning is to have leverage throughout the sales call. Yet the struggle you have with inside sales is, you’re not speaking to the prospect face-to-face.

That’s why it’s very important that you engage them and spark their interest within the first two to five minutes of the call.

If you can show the prospect that you’ve done your homework by doing research on them and asking them tailored questions, they’ll know you’re for real. For Boyle, that right there sets the stage for the rest of the sales process.

These are the important things you want to accomplish during a call, especially for inside sales:

• Build your credibility
• Show the prospect you care about them
• Show the prospect you want to help them overcome their pain points and achieve their goals

Pre-Call Planning Mistakes to Avoid

Boyle shared two things you need to avoid when doing pre-call planning. First is creating a script.

Creating a script for your sales call may make sense, especially for new hires. When there’s a lot of information to digest, rookie sales reps tend to rely on their script.

Inside sales reps, in particular, can leverage scripts as they don’t talk to prospects in person. Yet, Boyle said this is a common mistake.

According to him, using bullet points is better. Following a script can make you seem robotic or rehearsed, and it’s better to be yourself in a call and sound natural.

Following bullet points also allows you to be more flexible in case you encounter derailments or objections. You can deviate as needed to accommodate your prospect’s needs.

The second thing you need to avoid is getting sucked into social media. If you’re not careful, you might waste your time on personal browsing instead of doing your research.

Boyle also reminded that you need to stay focused when you visit the prospect’s website. Only visit specific parts of the website you need information from.

You have to understand that your objective is to develop trust and a good relationship with your prospect. You don’t need to know everything about them to do this — just enough information to start the conversation and tailor it.

Key Takeaway

The key takeaway Boyle imparted is this: Don’t assume your sales reps are doing pre-call planning despite knowing how important it is.

Take the time to ask them how they prepared for their call. It will surprise you how often your tenured reps wing calls.

It’s important to give your sales reps a template, blueprint, or checklist they can follow for their pre-call preparation. Remind them to spend at least 5-15 minutes on this task.

Pre-call planning is an essential part of the sales call process that salespeople should never skip. It may take extra time and effort, but when done correctly, it can yield excellent opportunities.

Follow Jeff Boyle’s five-step pre-call planning process today or create your own, so you won’t miss out on building lasting relationships with your prospects!

Why do think sales reps follow or not follow the pre-call planning process? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

Up Next: 

• What Role Content Plays In The Sales Process w/Dave Koslow @DocSend
• How Chat is Disrupting the Sales Process w/Jonny Everett @The Chat Shop
• Pipedrive Review: Overview, Features, And Pricing

RELATED: 7 Sales Techniques That Actually Work

In this article:

1. What Is a Sales Plan?
   1. Have a Customer Profile
   2. Evaluate Your Past and Present Performance
   3. Develop Your Market and Sales Strategy
   4. Determine and Communicate Your Positioning
   5. Set Your Revenue Goals
   6. Set Realistic and Clear Action Plans
   7. Own Your Niche
   8. Don’t Forget to Include Marketing In Your Sales Plan
   9. Encourage Your Sales Team to Generate Their Own Leads
   10. Take Into Account Competitor Analysis in Your Sales Strategy
   11. Remember to Always Create Sales Reports

How to Develop a Sales Strategy Plan

What Is a Sales Plan?

A sales plan or a sales strategy plan is essentially a sales organization’s specific approach or tactic when it comes to selling their product or service.

Each organization should have a unique approach, depending on different factors. However, there are usually essential parts of a sales plan that make for an effective sales strategy no matter the industry.

Here are some of the things you should incorporate into your sales strategy plan.

1. Have a Customer Profile

Earlier, we talked about assessing your clients. By reviewing your past performance, you can identify the clients who:

• Spend the most money
• Make repeat purchases
• Have the shortest sales cycle
• Are easy to work with

After determining your top clients, make a list of the qualities they have in common. This will then become your criteria for an ideal customer.

Look into their demographics and psychographics to create a full customer profile for your sales reps. They can refer to this to identify which prospects they are most likely to convert and encourage them to make repeat purchases.

Psychographics Definition: Psychographics is the classification of people based on their psychological attributes, such as their habits, preferences, and hobbies, among others.

This can help your team’s efficiency because your sales reps can focus their efforts on those who can yield returns. To avoid wasting opportunities, your sales reps must provide value and personalized experiences for each prospect and customer.

Your clients may have similar needs, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to implement a one-size-fits-all sales strategy on them. You have to serve them well — know their individual needs and find ways you can address those.

2. Evaluate Your Past and Present Performance

It’s always important to look back on your past and present performance to determine your next moves. Assess what you’ve accomplished by answering evaluation questions such as:

• How much revenue did you gain?
• Who were your top sellers?
• Who were your clients?
• Among your clients, who brought in the least and most profit? How long did it take you to support them?
• How many of your clients did repeat business with you?
• Are you currently positioned well to reach your revenue targets?

Your performance then and now will be the foundation of your new sales strategy plan. Understanding what you’ve been through and what you’ve accomplished will help you figure out what new bars you should set.

Doing a SWOT analysis will also help you create a strategic sales plan. This is a useful exercise that’s rooted in your business’ current state.

Identify your strengths and figure out how you can leverage them to maximize the opportunities you have. Determine the weaknesses and threats that hinder you from achieving the goals you set.

Then, come up with specific efforts to minimize those weaknesses and threats. These will help you build your sales plan.

3. Develop Your Market and Sales Strategy

When creating your sales and marketing strategies, consider planning for the following:

• Growing your existing accounts
• Getting referrals from the accounts you have
• Increasing your revenue in your current territories with new and existing products
• Increasing your revenue outside your territories with new and existing products

A sales strategy trend that’s worth a shot is storytelling. It’s a great way to move past the introduction stage and connect with people.

If you choose to go down this route, remember these best practices:

• Don’t make it all about you.
• Let your audience know you understand their struggles and share how you overcame them.
• Provide social proof using your customers’ success stories and testimonials.

Another thing you should consider when it comes to sales strategy is using data to drive it. Set benchmarks you can track using the data you gather from your sales efforts.

Data is powerful. It helps you measure your success on each strategy you implement and gives you insights on what you need to continue or improve on.

Looking for sales strategy templates? Check out our very own “Give-to-Get” Sales Play Template, which helped us build $1.5 million in the pipeline.

4. Determine and Communicate Your Positioning

Your market and sales strategy will come into play when it comes to positioning your company and products. They will help you determine the best way to do this to achieve growth.

Each market segment you have needs their own positioning. Creating this is a joint effort between the product, marketing, and sales teams.

The positioning statements you come up with should communicate the value proposition. It should also meet the needs of your ideal customer.

The unique selling point (USP) of your product or service is essential. It doesn’t have to be grand — it only has to hit your customer’s pain point and solve their problem.

Coming up with your own USP and positioning statements will undoubtedly give your sales strategy a boost.

5. Set Your Revenue Goals

After you’ve assessed your past and present performance and come up with a marketing and sales strategy, it’s time to come up with realistic revenue goals.

Huddle with your product, marketing, and sales teams to figure out how each team can support one another to achieve these goals.

Remember: when you set revenue goals that have no basis, more likely than not, everyone involved will only end up frustrated and disappointed.

RELATED: Using Advanced Analytics To Boost Revenue

6. Set Realistic and Clear Action Plans

When you’ve figured out your revenue goals, assign your sales reps to propose a funnel showing how they will generate that revenue. This may be in terms of the number of calls, sales deals closed, or time spent with each prospect and customer.

Ask them to come up with clear action plans and lay out their timeline as part of their sales planning process. For instance, one example of a good action plan is to always offer something valuable to prospects and customers.

Once they’ve come up with these, help out your sales reps fulfill their own goals by encouraging healthy competition within the team. Make sure that the incentives you provide will push them towards motivation.

7. Own Your Niche

Own your niche. Become the industry authority by specializing in something and innovating your products and services.

Dipping your toes in your industry isn’t enough to get people to support your business.

Marketing can help establish yourself as an authority. In fact, content marketing is the go-to marketing strategy to achieve this goal.

You can always add something new to your roster of specializations, but it never hurts to be well-known for your flagship product or service. This will strengthen your sales strategy and gain you more clients in the long run.

8. Don’t Forget to Include Marketing In Your Sales Plan

Sales and marketing aren’t separate entities. In fact, their work often interacts with one another.

There’s a need for sales and marketing to work together because they work hand-in-hand. Thus, for your sales strategy to not incorporate and coordinate with marketing is a tone-deaf and ineffective way to optimizing your sales process.

When planning sales strategies, don’t forget to take into account the marketing strategy of the marketing department. It’s essential for organizations to make sure the sales and marketing strategy are coordinated.

After all, it’ll be difficult for sales to sell to the leads that marketing creates if they aren’t marketing to the ideal customer.

9. Encourage Your Sales Team to Generate Their Own Leads

Speaking of sales and marketing being cross-functional teams, there’s the issue of lead generation. Usually, marketing is in charge of generating most of the leads for the sales team to push further in the sales funnel.

Although this is the case most of the time, it doesn’t mean your salespeople should leave it at that.

It wouldn’t hurt for them to have their own leads. The best way to do this is by tapping into the pool of their previous customers.

They can even do it just by ensuring they have a strong social media presence on crucial platforms. For example, LinkedIn is a great place to establish a professional appearance as a sales professional.

Of course, your sales team shouldn’t devote all their time and effort for lead generation, but doing it once in a while can help supplement a few their own leads at times.

10. Take Into Account Competitor Analysis in Your Sales Strategy

No strategic planning for an organization or sales is complete without a bit of competitor research.

If you need a bit of direction on how to package yourself better to your prospects, it’ll help to do some research. A bit of competitor intelligence analysis wouldn’t hurt at all.

One way to use competitor analysis to help fuel your sales strategies is by thoroughly checking out their sales pipeline. Look into how they generate their leads and what their customer profile likely is.

There are plenty of factors you can look into to gauge competitors’ sales strategies. From there, you can determine their weak points and take the opportunity to provide a solution to your competitor’s lapses.

Not only will it help you discover your branding, but it will help you solidify your sales goals.

Competitor analysis helps you become more in tune with the industry playmakers. At the same time, it enables you to learn about the opportunities out there that no one else has jumped on yet.

11. Remember to Always Create Sales Reports

It’s important to keep track of the progress you’re making down the sales pipeline in some way. Otherwise, how else are you going to figure out whether something is going right or wrong?

There are plenty of essential sales reports you need to make, including:

• Sales Forecast Reports: These reports help you figure out which sales activities to prioritize. Aside from that, they also help predict your potential revenue and other factors in the future based on historical data.
• Revenue Sales Reports: Gives a closer look and an overview of expected revenue goals as well as the current revenue achieved by your sales team.
• Sales Contacts Report: The sales contacts report is simply information on your current or previous sales contacts. This reports should include relevant information on each contact as well as a means to contact them.

These will help you optimize and create effective sales strategies in the future.

Your sales strategy plan must have clear priorities and guidelines, measurable outcomes, and realistic, actionable goals. All successful sales strategies require careful planning and consistent implementation.

While you can follow these tips as you see fit, don’t be afraid to build your sales strategy based on your past experiences. As long as you optimize your sales strategy plan based on relevant data, then it should work the best for you and your sales goals.

It’s vital that you learn from them so you can make better decisions that will take your business further.

Which tip in creating a sales strategy plan do you find most challenging? Let us know why in the comments section below.

Up Next:

• Mapping the Sales Process: 6 Steps for Success
• 7 Ways to Boost Sales Effectiveness
• Sales Best Practices Every Sales Professional Should Know

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on May 16, 2019, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.

In this episode of Sales Secrets, I talk about how to optimize sales process and, more importantly, how to do it right, from top to bottom. Keep reading to learn more.

RELATED: What Role Content Plays in the Sales Process w/Dave Koslow @DocSend

In this article:

1. How to Optimize Sales Process from Top to Bottom
2. Understand Your Goals
3. The Foundational Elements of a Good Sales Process Design
   1. Demand Waterfall
   2. The Business Development Hand-Off Process
   3. Commonly Asked Questions on the Process
   4. Best Practice Advice for BDRs
   5. Campaign Structure
   6. Lead Scoring
   7. Lead Statuses and Deal Stages
4. Process Map
5. Governance
6. First Call Sequence Enablement
7. Stage Two Criteria

Ways to Optimize Sales Process

How to Optimize Sales Process from Top to Bottom

A lot of sales organizations really struggle in trying to get the nuts and bolts down on the sales process flow. Nobody likes to talk about them because they’re so detailed.

If your organization isn’t getting into the detailed ways to optimize the sales process, you’re going to miss when it comes to figuring out what’s working or not.

People have asked me before about setting up a good structure. In order to win at a high level, the number one thing you have to remember is you have to understand your goals.

What are you ultimately trying to hit? Personally, I hate it when people walk me through a process without talking about the big picture.

Aside from that, there are three ways to optimize sales process. First is to lay a foundation where you define your basic elements.

Then, you need to map your entire process. Lastly, you move into governance where there are some reporting and enablement elements.

At a high level, those are the sales optimization techniques you should apply from top to bottom.

Understand Your Goals

In talking about the sales process, I want people to show me the big picture, first and foremost. This means figuring out your annual contract value (ACV) goal and the number of inbound or outbound marketing contacts you need to hit in order to meet that.

Next, I want to know what the sales-qualified lead (SQL) is. This is the middle part of the funnel that organizations need to go after.

Think about what your enterprise market looks like as well. If you know your overall number and you can’t break it down by marketing and sales, you’re at a miss.

We expect marketing to attribute 40% of the pipeline, while sales gets 60%.

How does sales break that down? Stage two, or the sales qualified opportunity (SQO), can be a very important part of that.

Know your numbers and break them down for marketing and sales if you can. Don’t simply say you need to hit $100 million for your segment.

Break it down further into the number of SQOs and marketing contacts that amount translate to. Those will then become your Marketing and Sales teams‘ goals.

The Foundational Elements of a Good Sales Process Design

Let’s move onto the process and how to optimize sales process. We use SiriusDecisions — they’re a great consulting and analyst firm, and experts in sales and marketing optimization.

SiriusDecisions provides a framework to have a conversation. You can take their framework and customize it for your own needs.

They also give you ideas on how to structure your waterfall, or your pipeline, from top to bottom. They call it the “demand waterfall.”

Remember, it’s hard to have great conversations if you don’t have a framework.

Demand Waterfall

Using the demand waterfall for optimizing the sales process

Now let me walk you through our customized demand waterfall, a framework that can help you optimize sales process.

At the very top, there’s money. Money goes into the campaigns and the campaigns yield results.

When that starts to flow through, they fall into XANT’s three tiers:

First are the inbound campaigns that generate an inquiry, which is the lead. When that lead hits certain criteria or threshold, it becomes a marketing qualified lead (MQL).

Let’s say a lead enters the system via web form. The marketing system then picks that up, scores it, then routes it to a BDR.

Second are the outbound campaigns, which are business development-generated. When an outbound initiative yields leads, we stamp them with something called the business development-generated lead (BGL).

Our business development reps accept those leads and work on them. Then, if they qualify something, we stamp them as a business-qualified lead (BQL).

Third, once the BDR qualifies something, he transfers it to the sales team. The sales team accepts it as a sales qualified opportunity (SQO) and continues working on it.

We also have something called sales-generated leads, which are leads that our sales team creates on their own.

This is a high-level funnel that we can track top to bottom. It’s also a great way to have real conversations with our sales, marketing, and ops teams.

You need to get this because without the process, you can’t hit your numbers.

The Business Development Hand-Off Process

The next part on how to optimize the sales process is the business development hand-off. You need to have the business development team accept the marketing-qualified or business-generated leads so you can move them.

If you don’t have a BD team, it’s still a fairly similar process. Only now, you’ll most likely have the sales team accept the lead.

We want our BDRs to start working on the stamped leads before they exit that part of the process.

We also have service-level agreements (SLAs) put in place. These make the process real, and so does reporting.

For instance, if I give an MQL to somebody, I expect them to respond quickly to it. I expect them to hit it by contacting at least six times in ten days.

We also have reports to back that up, because if our reps don’t follow our SLAs, we enforce an escalation process.

The BDRs need to follow a qualification process. At the end of this process, the BDR is either going to disqualify the lead or hand it over to the Account Executive.

The AE is then going to take the BQL and they’re going to hold a meeting to see if they can put it in their pipeline.

Commonly Asked Questions on the Process

1. Should your organization eliminate the BD Team and have the Account Managers assume their role?

Though that is an option, I’m not a fan of that. I believe it’s essential to have a Business Development team.

If your average contract value (ACV) is transactional in nature, meaning it’s typically 10,000 to 15,000, you can have the sales rep work on it. If you’re closing deals at more than 50,000, you’d definitely want a BD team.

2. Do Marketing and Sales have to align when it comes to the hand-off process?

Your whole team has to align and agree on the process. Go over all the definitions, every stage gate, and every SLA together, then have everyone sign on the agreement.

3. How do you distribute leads?

There are several ways how you can do this, like using a merit-based or round-robin process. At ZANT, we apply an account-based motion.

Any time a lead comes in and becomes an MQL, it immediately transfers to the BDR and then the AE so they can work on it.

There’s also the prioritization model, which is more of an inbound approach. Here, you put leads in and hand them to someone who works on the inbound leads.

They have ten minutes to handle that lead. If they don’t get it — and that lead should hit a certain threshold — then it automatically moves over to another rep.

4. Is it better to have Business Development Resource part of Marketing or Sales?

A lot of researches say that it’s 60-30-10. Most companies have business development reporting in sales (that’s the 60%).

30% are reporting to marketing, and 10% in other departments.

Here’s the rule of thumb:

• For outbound, enterprise motion companies — Report under sales
• For transactional, high-velocity companies — Report under marketing

Best Practice Advice for BDRs

As part of learning how to optimize the sales process, you also need to know how to pay BDRs. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t pay them for setting an appointment.

They need to go through the discovery call, and you should have a process for this. Otherwise, your BDRs will have a hard time getting through it.

After the discovery call, they need to ensure that they get a commitment for the next steps. Ideally, this is within a week or two, and the maximum should be 30 days.

They need to get the AE’s confirmation if they’re going to put it into their pipeline. If the AE says yes, that’s when you pay your BDR.

If the AE doesn’t say yes, there are two things your BDR can do.

1. They can kill the opportunity and start over.
2. It can stay in stage one while the BDR gathers additional information and resets the appointment.

Remember, there are different qualification models and you should build your qualification questions around one of these:

• BANT — Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing
• ANUM — Authority, Need, Urgency, and Money
• AN — Authority and Need

When your company belongs to an unidentified or new space, you can’t ask for urgency and money — you have to create those. When that urgency comes, money appears.

RELATED: 7 Most Common Mistakes in Sales Process Mapping and How to Avoid Them

Campaign Structure

Creating a great campaign structure for optimal sales

Next, there needs to be a way to report on everything in your system. We call this the campaign structure.

You need to know why, how, and when you execute tasks. If you don’t know how your tasks and leads ended up in your CRM, then you’re totally off.

You need a campaign structure because it sets up your reporting.

Lead Scoring

If you want to take scoring up to the next level, you should use a predictive score. We do offer a predictive score with some of XANT’s technology.

At the base level, you should have some version of a marketing-qualified score.

Lead Statuses and Deal Stages

The other key processes when it comes to learning how to optimize the sales process are your lead statuses and deal stages. If you don’t have these in order, you won’t be able to stamp things and mark your prospecting pipeline (where BDs work) and your pipeline (where sales reps work).

Don’t pass over this — define them and what they do. Make sure they’re in the system and that people are using statuses and stages.

One of the things you’ll need to tackle with your statuses is nurture tracks. If you choose to nurture your lead status, that person will be automatically enrolled in your nurture campaign.

Here, they’ll learn all about what makes your company better than the competition. Those lead statuses in nurture tracks become fundamental in your overall structure.

This concludes the foundational elements of a good sales flow, and they should exist within your organization.

Process Map

With those foundational elements, you need to have a high-level process map that shows how things move through the different gates.

Sales leaders may not need this, but sales ops and marketing ops better have it.

Governance

When it comes to governance, you need to have an overall framework. The framework gives you a common language, and you can talk through it.

Everything ties back to that overall framework, so you need to build this for your organization.

First Call Sequence Enablement

Building a great first call sequence enablement document

This is the money — the enablement document that allows people to follow this structure. We call this the first call sequence enablement doc.

When I listen to phone calls of business development reps, this is the doc I score them on. You need to have a call structure document called a “first call sequence.”

Anything that passes from a business development rep to an account executive should undergo scoring.

Stage Two Criteria

The stage two criteria in the sales process flowchart is what we use in defining what moves or doesn’t move in the people pipeline. This also includes the discovery call.

If you don’t have a way to capture if your sales process flow is working or not, none of your work will matter. You have to get the basics down.

Get the process down, build a framework, and learn how to optimize sales process. This will make your life so much easier and help your organization thrive.

What’s the most challenging part of the sales process for you? Let us know in the comments section below!

Up Next:

• Best Lead Generation Methods for Creating Pipeline
• The Selling Formula w/Brian Robinson
• My Data-Driven Recruitment Strategies and Hiring Process on a Budget

RELATED: The 9 Best Sales Prospecting Tips And Techniques You Can Do Now

In this article:

1. Mapping The Ideal Process Instead Of The Real One
2. Focusing On The Wrong Person
3. Not Having a Standardized Notion
4. Mapping Details But Losing Track Of The Big Picture
5. Mapping The Process Without Showing How Results Will Be Measured
6. Never Updating Process Maps
7. Buying Somebody Else’s Ideal Sales Process

How To Avoid These 7 Common Sales Process Mapping Mistakes

1. Mapping The Ideal Process Instead Of The Real One

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that sales process mapping is about creating a vision of what an ideal sales process looks like. This is not the case.

Creating a sales process map is, first and foremost, about observing and mapping one’s current sales processes or activities. From here, the team can suggest changes that can improve it.

Mapping an ideal sales process instead of one grounded on the actual process will most likely result in a failed implementation. Often, this is because that ideal process is far from the realities of the company.

For the sales process map to work, the changes you wish to implement have to happen slowly. You have to take into consideration the limits of your team and their ability to adapt to the changes you wish to implement.

2. Focusing On The Wrong Person

Sales process mapping over an entire business

Another common mistake businesses make in sales process mapping is making it about the sales department of the company. The essence of any successful sales process is and always will be the customers.

Focusing on the wrong set of people when mapping sales processes will most certainly lead to mistakes. While the company employees are, of course, a big part of the equation, it must always focus on the customer.

Sales processes that actually work are those that create value for one’s customers. They should be able to answer the question of how your business can create real value for your clients.

If a business, for example, needs an administrative phase, then that business should learn how that phase creates value for the customer. Otherwise, they should place that phase where it creates said value.

Everything that a business does to look for, gain, and retain customers should produce clear value for them. Customer value is a business’ first line of defense against constantly-changing markets, technologies, and conditions.

“The customer is always right,” does not necessarily mean that they are always right. It does, however, mean that their point of view is.

This should be the key factor when mapping, evaluating, and improving any sales activity process.

3. Not Having a Standardized Notion

Having a standard way of notating sales process flowcharts across the board is a must for any successful sales process mapping activity. Not having this creates confusion, especially when employees use various process maps.

The shapes, text, and language you use in every document have to be consistent. This helps avoid confusion among workers and mistakes that could be costly.

To avoid this, it’s important for businesses to decide on conventions early. Afterward, these conventions should be used while creating process maps.

The style guide should always be readily available for anyone’s viewing should they need it.

4. Mapping Details But Losing Track Of The Big Picture

Exhaustion from sales process mapping

This is one of the most common mistakes that manifest in a lot of attempts at sales process mapping.

When it comes to the mapping of a sales process — or any process, in fact — people forget that there’s such a thing as too many details. They easily forget to consider the big picture.

A lot of these maps are too detailed, capturing more information than an individual can realistically take in at once. Sometimes, each activity may also seem equally important and co-dependent with the others when this may not be the reality.

A process should be equally about input as much as it is about output.

Things will function more smoothly if one begins with the bigger aspects of every activity. Afterward, they can move towards breaking them down into smaller details.

From there, it becomes easier to identify and measure decision points and their results. This allows one to gain critical insight that is necessary for process improvement.

Again, any sales process mapping activity should focus on three main elements:

• Input
• Output
• Necessary steps to get from point A to point B.

Once you have identified these, you can begin breaking them down into smaller parts with big picture consistently in mind.

RELATED: The Sales Cadence Tool You Need To Generate More Leads

5. Mapping The Process Without Showing How Results Will Be Measured

For a sales process to be considered truly effective, there must be clear metrics that assess each step or phase in that process. Many businesses forget to include this in their mapping activities.

Having clear metrics allows the business to adapt their qualifying and marketing strategies. Metrics can serve as powerful indicators of shifts in the market, allowing you time to adjust accordingly.

It also identifies weak links and bottlenecks in the process, thus allowing you to allocate your resources and efforts where they are more needed.

Bottlenecks Definition: In a production system, bottlenecks are points of congestion that happen when the workload arrives too quickly for the next processor to handle, thereby creating delays and increasing production costs. The term comes from the image of the neck of a bottle which is the area where congestion or clogging is most likely to occur when pouring liquid from the bottle.

If, for example, a business’ marketing is not able to generate good leads, adding more salespeople and spending on making them undergo expensive training services will not help. Instead, improvements to the marketing process should be made to encourage leads generation.

These adjustments can only happen if there are clear metrics on the effectiveness of each step or phase in the sales process.

6. Never Updating Process Maps

Updating a sales process map to ensure accuracy

The systems put in place for a business should be living and breathing, just like the business itself. Something that produces results today may cause a business to lose clients tomorrow.

Similar to everything else, change is constant. The effectiveness of a sales plan depends on its ability to adapt to these changes.

In line with Mistake #5, process maps should be reviewed, evaluated, and changed to adapt to the results of the metrics mentioned above. This will allow for continuous process improvement since weak links and bottlenecks will be identified by the metrics.

However, despite the presence of these measures, some businesses fail to update their process maps. This could be because it wasn’t included during planning.

A lot of people make the mistake of not designating time and resources for the periodic updating of these maps. This could lead to a business with an outdated and inefficient sales process because changes that need to be adapted weren’t implemented.

As such, it’s important to hire a person whose job function is to oversee and manage the process maps. Make sure they’re regularly reviewed and modified as necessary.

7. Buying Somebody Else’s Ideal Sales Process

A lot of sales processes are bundled as sales software systems. While these can be useful when implemented appropriately, they can also be damaging when not used properly.

Businesses who purchase these so-called “ideal sales processes” often fit their business to the software when in fact, the software should be the one adapting to the business.

Admittedly, suppliers of these software and training give valuable tools that help support a business’ sales process. However, no business can purchase its sales process from a supplier.

An effective sales process requires the input of your people because it’s about your strategy when it comes to customer relationship.

It should be the organization’s leaders who decide on a common vision. They’re the ones who need to implement the process collaboratively to create and achieve that very vision.

Sales process mapping is an invaluable tool businesses can use to improve how they do things and drive sales up. Avoid these seven mistakes mentioned above to truly make the most of this activity.

Are there other sales process mapping mistakes we may have missed? Share them with us in the comments section below! 

Up Next:

• Sales Email Secrets | Secrets Of Email Prospecting To Increase Open Rates
• 7 Ways To Boost Sales Effectiveness
• Marketing And Sales: Why They Need Each Other

In this article:

1. Why Are Sales Experiments Important?
2. How to Create a Culture of Experimentation in Sales
3. How to Conduct Sales Experiments: The Basics
4. Sales Experiment: Subject Lines
5. Sales Experiment: Short vs Long Copy
6. Sales Experiment: Buyer Personas
7. Sales Experiment: Channels
8. Sales Experiment: SPIFs and Incentives
9. Sales Experiment: Messaging
10. Sales Experiment: Landing Pages
11. How to Conduct Sales Experiments: Weekly Processes
12. Add Experimentation to Your Weekly 1:1s
13. Track Your Experiments: Experiment Boards
14. How to Conduct Sales Experiments: Scaling and Killing Ideas
15. Run Better Sales Experiments: More Resources

Impact of Sales Experiments on Your Business

Why Are Sales Experiments Important?

What comes to mind when you hear the word “experiments?” Perhaps you picture Emmett “Doc” Brown from Back to the Future, or maybe you see Beaker from The Muppets.

What you probably do not envision is cold calling, Grant Cardone, or a room filled with sales professionals. Experimentation is critical for optimizing all facets of the inside sales process, yet it isn’t always at the top of the priority list for marketing and sales.

The question is why? When not carried out appropriately, experimentation can be a waste of crucial time and money.

So, what’s the magical secret to successful experimentation? The answer is in the execution.

How to Create a Culture of Experimentation in Sales

The key to sales experimentation is to run scientifically rigorous tests designed to improve efficiency and results over time. This not only includes utilizing A/B testing, email subject lines, and buyer personas – but actually ingraining experimentation into the culture of the sales organization.

Sales luminaries such as Heather Morgan, author of great breakdowns on the basics of sales experimentation, have written in depth on the importance of these elements in experimentation.

The information below will delve deeper into the subject of sales experimentation, and how to inject it into your sales culture DNA.

How to Conduct Sales Experiments: The Basics

Conducting sales experiments

If you have never run a sales experiment before, familiarize yourself with the basics. The following are great starting points for sales experimentation.

Sales Experiment: Subject Lines

Keep them short, sweet, and personalized. Ask yourself, what subject lines resonate most highly with the target audience?

A/B test them to discover the answer. Invest in tools like XANT, which give you the ability to mass test A/B subject lines and see which ones produce better open rates.

Subject line experimentation is a vital part of discovering the secret sauce in what you’re selling. This video from former Zenefits CMO Matt Epstein and case study from SalesFolk CEO Heather Morgan highlight the benefits that one can reap from A/B testing email subject lines.

Sales Experiment: Short vs Long Copy

This is a simple yet important experiment to run with your cold email copy. Test short copy, test long copy, test all copies!

So which style do you use, short or long? This all comes down to the results of your sales experiments, and the response rate/meeting set percentage from sending these emails to your prospective clients.

The short copy versus long copy experiment extends to language (folksy versus professional). Again, we recommend using XANT or another sales acceleration tool to track and optimize your email copy.

Sales Experiment: Buyer Personas

Personas are a pivotal part of your sales experimentation process.

You might think you know your ideal buyer, but if you sell B2B, chances are you have multiple buyers with several different personas. You should not take your buyer personas for granted.

As former Zenefits CMO Matt Epstein notes in his presentation, the obvious persona may not, in fact, be the right one. Zenefits initially targeted human resources professionals as the key buyers for its Payroll, Benefits, and HR Software-as-a-Service platform.

Through persona testing, Epstein found that HR professionals were actually less likely than average to buy their software, whereas C-Level executives were most likely to buy it.

Sales Experiment: Channels

In today’s crowded digital landscape, you have to reach buyers via their preferred channel to achieve a high conversion rate. Email, phone, social media, and events are just a few examples of outreach channels where sales and marketing pros can engage buyers.

Time is limited, so it’s important to focus your sales outreach efforts on the channels where buyers are most likely to respond.

Channel experimentation should include multi-channel outreach methods. Phone, email, and social touches are all key components of a multi-channel outreach strategy.

You should also test time of day and days of the week during outreach to see what works best in terms of timing.

Again, sales acceleration technology like XANT is a perfect vehicle for conducting such efforts and tracking the results. If the phone is where the most successful initial contact is made, then triple down on that.

Sales Experiment: SPIFs and Incentives

Another opportunity for experimentation involves SPIFs (Sales Performance Incentive Funds). Experimenting with SPIF formats and incentives is a great way to try creative new approaches to motivating your sales team.

If you have been running the same cookie-cutter “Call Blitz”-style SPIFs with a boring gift card or basic monetary reward, this is a golden opportunity to try out new and exciting formats (such as team sales contests) and incentives.

What is SPIF? This is a cash incentive or rebate given to salespeople when they sell products or items. It can also be viewed as a bonus for reaching a goal in selling.

Sales Experiment: Messaging

A great way to expand the scope of your messaging testing is to let reps get creative with a portion of their email outreach.

Want to include GIFs in 20% of your cold emails? Make it a sales experiment and track the results and its effectiveness.

Want to drastically change the copy and positioning of your pitch? Let a rep try it out as a sales experiment and track the results.

Encouraging creative new messaging approaches as a form of sales experiments does a few things. It can do the following:

• Widens the scope of testing on your messaging and overall pitch.
• Allows reps to get creative and feel a sense of ownership in the sales process.
• Builds creativity into your sales process in a structured and controlled way.

It’s important to differentiate this experiment from the ones listed above, such as Short Copy Vs Long Copy. The point of this experiment is to encourage as much creativity as possible.

Go beyond buyer personas, subject lines, and so forth, and try to find your breakout messaging.

Sales Experiment: Landing Pages

Landing pages are great places to experiment with messaging, copy, and calls-to-action.  If you sell a product or service, it’s pivotal to find the best elevator pitch that resonates with buyers.

A great way to discover the winning elevator pitch is to A/B test landing page messaging using Unbounce, Optimizely, or Google Optimize. All of these services let you create multiple variations of a specific landing page and track which one drives the best conversion rate.

RELATED: Sales Development Experiment: Switch Your Best Outbound Reps to Inbound

How to Conduct Sales Experiments: Weekly Processes

Analyzing sales experiments with coworkers

Creating a culture of sales experimentation should extend beyond the basics described above. It’s critical to create opportunities for experimentation throughout your sales force to foster creativity and expedite growth.

As much as sales experimentation gets associated with a bloodless, numbers-driven process, it’s really much more than that. It’s about creating a culture that unlocks rep potential, inspires your workforce, induces collaboration, and expedites the overall growth of your sales organization.

For that reason, we advise implementing the following into your weekly processes:

Add Experimentation to Your Weekly 1:1s

During your weekly 1:1s, add a section about experimentation.

Where in the past week have you experimented with something new? What has worked and what hasn’t?

Having these types of conversations in your weekly 1:1s will ensure your salespeople know the importance of constant experimentation.

In addition, hearing your reps talk through why they are experimenting and how they are experimenting really helps you understand where they are in their maturity as an inside salesperson. You will find that your top reps are almost always better at creating smart experiments to test.

Track Your Experiments: Experiment Boards

Experiment boards are an easy way to keep track of the team’s experiments.

You don’t need to use anything fancy. Excel or Google Sheets are sufficient.

If you want to step your game up try Asana or Trello.

The process is simple, you set up an excel sheet like the one shown below. This sheet will track key items such as campaign name, owner, list name, launch date, buyer target, list size, success criteria, meetings set, decision date, and scale/kill.

Your inside sales team will use this shared document to track ongoing experiments. As a team, you get together once a week and review existing experiments (how are they going, are we killing them or scaling them) and create a queue of new sales experiments.

This meeting accomplishes a few important things – first, the team has a great discussion about what is and what isn’t working. It’s very common for inside sales teams to work in silos, and these meetings generate critical group conversations.

Second, it gets the inside sales team thinking about what success looks like.

One of the great outcomes of experiment boards is the inside salesperson has to “call their shot” about why they are experimenting, who they are experimenting on, and what success looks like (meeting percentage rate, number of replies, etc.).

Randomly experimenting can waste precious time. Setting goals for major experiments will help keep the team focused.

How to Conduct Sales Experiments: Scaling and Killing Ideas

Integrating the use of experiment boards and having a weekly meeting on experiments will help create a culture of experimentation. As mentioned earlier, it also saves precious time, especially for businesses doing retail sales.

It’s important to adhere to agile and lean startup principles by scaling or killing the idea rapidly depending on its success (or lack thereof).  The important thing to remember is that speed of response time is your ultimate goal.

If an experiment is clearly working, then you should extend it and amplify it across your organization. If an experiment is failing, then you need to kill it before you waste unnecessary rep time on a futile effort.

Wasted time is the enemy of inside sales teams. Killing bad campaigns quickly and scaling good campaigns is one of the easiest ways to combat wasted time.

Run Better Sales Experiments: More Resources

The more sales experiments you run in your sales organization, the faster you will level up in your targeting, messaging, engagement methodology, and closing speed.

Use the experiments and implementation strategies discussed above to jumpstart your sales team, and create a culture of sales experimentation within your organization.

To get more great resources on inside sales strategy and alignment, check out the Organic B2B Inbound Marketing Guide from OutboundView and our accompanying guest article in Sales Hacker.

Do you run sales experiments in your business? Share your successful test procedures in the comments section below!

Up Next: Jill Konrath on Experimenting With Sales

Blake Johnston, CEO of OutboundView:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/blake-johnston-1b954a4/

Blake Johnston is the CEO of OutboundView, a sales and marketing consultancy based in Nashville, TN focused on designing and implementing outbound and inbound marketing strategies.

This is a critical component of sales and I remember years ago often sitting around with the rest of the sales team, swapping stories of using objection handling techniques to help customers do what was best for them. When I began bouncing from industry to industry as a sales-training and team-building consultant, I shared the same stories with the heads of sales departments and companies.

In the last five years or so, though, those stories have dried up. It seems that sales has become inundated with canned objection rebuttals, little by little replacing techniques and listening skills to objection handle.

There is a rush to throw new hires into the fray, perhaps because attrition in general tends to be high these days and sales has always been one of the departments to churn and burn staff more than most.

The logical result is to train less on meaningful communication with the customer, as that takes time and polish, and to replace it with canned phrases and rebuttals. It’s like a new version of dialing for dollars. And, just like dialing for dollars, it is wasteful and ineffective.

The result? Even greater turnover on the sales team paired with fewer sales. Bring back the stories of listening and helping customers overcome their own self-created obstacles! Here then are some valuable objection-handling techniques, along with examples.

Bring the Customer With You

Telling isn’t selling. We all know it, yet many of us spend considerable time pitching—i.e. talking instead of asking questions and listening. The three steps in this process enable us to ask questions, listen and guide the customer with us to logical conclusions they didn’t initially see. Tips and tricks:

1)      Acknowledge the customer’s practice/position/statement.

2)      Get permission to ask a question.

3)      Immediately ask your first question without waiting for the customer’s reply.

In my very first sales job, on my very first day on the phone (ahh, that takes me back), I connected with a purchasing manager who was pissed about a dozen computers he had purchased. (I was selling office supplies, cold calling to schedule in-person appointments.) The computers were a flop and he was taking a lot of heat about them. I had him ready to talk to me about buying computers. One problem: I knew very little about computers.

“Okay,” I relayed, “so at this point what I’m going to do is transfer you to our computer expert.”

“Wait, what?! You don’t even know anything about computers? Great, another waste of my time. I’m hanging up.”

“Sure, I can understand why you’d want to do that. (Acknowledged his statement.) Let me ask you a question. (Got permission to ask a question.) You want to make sure no one complains to you about these new computers, right? (Immediately asked the first question.)”

“Yeah, I don’t want any complaints.”

“Okay, so whoever sold you those computers didn’t know enough to get you the right ones or didn’t care. Is that a fair assessment?”

“Yeah, I’d say it is.”

“So, I simply want to make certain we get you the exact computers you need. I know computers but we have someone here right now who knows the most of anyone in our company and you deserve to have him talk with you, don’t you? To talk to the best?”

“Damn straight. Put ‘em on, Ian, and thanks.”

I transferred the customer to my manager (our computer expert) after briefing him on the customer. I checked my first sale off the to-do list a few minutes later.

The Takeaway

This aggressive rebuttal requires particularly smooth delivery, so be certain to pay attention to that detail. Tips and tricks:

• Implement when a customer objects to answering questions you need answered to provide them a solution.
• Remove something of potential value to the customer from the conversation and let the customer know it is being removed.
• End with a question to avoid being perceived as confrontational.

After conducting an objection-handling training, I observed the participating staff. The products were e-blasts and contact lists. Jumping ahead to where the takeaway was utilized by a rep:

“Okay, and what is your budget for this?”

“I prefer not to say.” (Objection.)

“All right, let me just ask, why is that?”

“Because my budget is for all online marketing, including search engine optimization and ad clicks. I don’t want to use it all for buying contact lists and sending e-blasts.”

“Sure, I can understand that. Just so you understand, it’s helpful for me to know your budget so that I can make the best recommendations for you. Does that make sense?”

“Yes, but I’m still not sharing my budget.” (Continued objection to a question that needs to be answered.)

“Okay, I understand and respect your position. We offer a number of discounts and incentives when you combine features and schedule recurring e-blasts. A lot of our customers are able to do more with less by taking advantage of these incentives. I’m going to keep them out of the conversation for now, to be certain I don’t mislead you in any way by discussing options that are out of your budget. (Removed object of value.) Does that make sense? (Asked question to avoid seeming confrontational.)

“Yes. All right, my budget is $80,000.”

The What-If Scenario

In this approach, you create a fictional story to help guide the customer to logically conclude their objection is inconsequential.

I listened in on a live call of one of my for-profit college admissions (sales) rep’s, utilizing this technique with a lead who had missed three appointments to come tour the school and speak with her in-person. (I was director of admissions at the time.) The school was located in Chicago. Jumping ahead to his reason for missing:

“Yeah, I didn’t have bus fare.”

“Okay, Dave, let me ask you a question. If you found out you had a long lost relative in England who died, and they had left you $30,000 but you had to get to England to claim it, wouldn’t you find the money to get to England?”

“Oh yeah, definitely!”

“So, our graduates with the certificate you want typically make $30,000 in their first job, and that’s annually not just one time. So why wouldn’t you find a way to get bus fare to come here, which is a lot less money than you need to get to England?”

“Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, actually.”

He rescheduled and showed for the appointment.

The Results

In each example, the sale was made and the customer profited, with the last one becoming a top student in his class. He earned a $40K paycheck in his first job after graduation, in which the school placed him (back in the year 2000).

We don’t always make the sale when we handle objections, which is perfectly okay because objection handling doesn’t mean overcoming the objection; rather, it is simply addressing it. If we don’t point out the folly of our customers’ objections, we aren’t doing what is best for them.

It’s important we don’t confuse objection handling with leaning on the customer, repeatedly, until they close.

If you’re looking to read more about selling strategies, check out my book, “The Customer is Never Right.”

Happy closing!

Sales Development is here to stay but it’s always changing. David Dulany is the founder and CEO of Tenbound, a company focused on bringing together the sales development community. David discusses trends and problems facing the sales development space and what managers and leaders need to know to stay ahead of the curve.

In This Episode You’ll Learn:

• What to expect from the one and only Sales Development Conference
• Top trends faced by sales development teams
• Top problems faced by sales development teams
• What sales development teams can do today to start winning

Links and Resources Related to This Episode:

• The Sales Development Conference
• David Dulany’s LinkedIn
• Sales Development Certification Program
• Lessons Learned from Scaling a 100 Person Sales Development Team at Apptus

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