Trim the Fat From Your Sales Process
Every company has an opportunity to streamline its sales process. Organizations get stuck in tradition and expectations, but conventions can be holding you back.
It's time to challenge convention to deliver better sales results. To dramatically speed up sales, you've got to trim the fat from your sales process by questioning everything.
Stuck in Tradition
Companies do a lot of things in sales out of tradition. In the pre-Internet days companies relied on large outside sales forces, because they were the most efficient way to connect and communicate with customers. Today, the Internet has replaced most of what outside reps do.
Companies continue to sell like the Internet hasn't changed customers expectations:
- Do your customers really have to meet a salesperson to get pricing? Would customers prefer to get pricing from your website?
- Do your customers require a face-to-face meeting to make a purchase decision, or will a phone meeting suffice?
- Do your customers really need to receive a written proposal? Would a verbal quote or an email with pricing satisfy their needs?
Strangely, companies are still relying on outside sales reps to be the conduits of information versus questioning how customers really want to buy. This is shaped by preconceived expectations: outside sales reps are better than inside sales; this is the way we've always sold; face-to-face interactions are better.
This is the fat, and corporate sales teams are filled with it.
Question Every Step in the Sales Process
In 2007 I saw David Berman, then president of WebEx, speak at the Sales 2.0 conference. In his presentation, David demonstrated how WebEx had compressed its sales cycle from 90 days to 21 days. His message to the audience was direct: eliminate everything that causes a delay in the sales cycle.
David said the biggest problem with an outside sales force is the they create unnecessary scheduling delays. Every time an outside sales rep books a face-to-face meeting, time gets added to the sales process.
Think about it. The customer calls in for pricing information, and instead of giving a quote and proceeding to a logical next step, the sales rep asks for a meeting. The meeting is scheduled a few days later, and the buying process is needlessly slowed down.
These are the decisions that fatten your sales process. A face-to-face meeting may be a better experience, but is it really what the customer needs to make a purchase decision?
I am not suggesting you should blindly eliminate face-to-face meetings from your sales process, but you should question the need for them. Every unnecessary step you can trim from the sales process is another opportunity to win a sale faster.
Use Metrics to Trim the Fat
Velocity is a measure of how quickly it takes to close a sale, and it's the measure to improve your sales process. By measuring each stage of the sales process, you can spot opportunities to trim the fat.
Velocity is a relatively easy metric to capture. You can track the time it takes a customer to move through each phase of your sales funnel from inquiry to close. Track velocity with some simple metrics:
- How long does it take for your organization to respond to a website lead?
- How long does it take for a customer to receive pricing?
- How long does it take to move a customer from inquiry to close?
Once you have velocity metrics, you can start looking for fat to trim. What can you trim to make it easier for your customers to buy?
Simplify the Buying Process
Again and again organizations needlessly complicate things in their sales processes.
It may be "best practice" to have face-to-face meetings or write long winded proposals, but is that what your customers really need?
Put yourself in your customers' shoes. What do they want? When do they want it? How can you make buying your services super easy and simple?
Every organization accumulates fat in different places, and sales force improvement programs that work for one organization may not work for yours. But if you get obsessive in making buying your services simple and easy, you'll find there are plenty of opportunities to trim the fat from your sales process.
