Many businesses are understandably hesitant to change their sales process, particularly if it’s consistently generating revenue. However, in B2B sales, risk aversion can blind sales teams to open opportunities for sales process optimization to accomplish better revenue with less effort or fewer resources. Plus, B2Bs understand that optimization is important as something that worked six months ago might not be as effective in the present.
Sales process optimization is not a one-off activity. Instead, it is a reiterative and ongoing process. Today businesses are looking for a clear sales strategy, as it is essential for discovering opportunities and meeting sales targets. Customers have more sophisticated needs, higher service expectations, and access to competitive options, making it harder to convert leads.
Sales optimization and customer needs are the center of focus for businesses and it can help sales teams rise to this challenge and close more deals. A well-optimized sales process eradicates bottlenecks and potential risks, empowering sales teams to close more high-value deals.
By streamlining steps of optimization, businesses can achieve higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, enhanced customer experiences, and improved team productivity.
What Is a Sales Process?
A sales process consists of a recurrent series of stages that a sales team can use with a potential customer to move that prospect down the conventional sales funnel. While each business has different sales steps, most businesses use the process below:
- Stage 01 – Sales Prospecting
- Stage 02 – Initiating Contact
- Stage 03 – Identifying Needs
- Stage 04 – Presenting Offers
- Stage 05 – Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Stage 06 – Negotiating Contract
- Stage 07 – Closing Deals
Benefits of Sales Process Optimization
Sales process optimization is a reiterative process that banks on smaller, data-driven decisions made at every stage of the sales process journey. Thus, sales process optimization strategies must be much more holistic than ever before.
Implementing a robust sales process offers several benefits for businesses including:
- Increased Revenue & Profitability: Streamlining the sales processes improves business efficiency. Furthermore, sales process optimization leads to larger deal sizes, higher conversion rates, and boost in revenue.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: Optimized sales results in quicker responses from the prospects, resulting in accurate quotes, and personalized interactions. This contributes to superior customer experience.
- Improved Performance from the Sales Team: Sales optimization provides your sales teams better tools, insights, data, etc., to perform more effectively and close large size deals more efficiently.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making: A well-planned sales process leverages data to make informed strategic decisions, reducing guesswork and improving overall sales strategy.
- Scalability: Sales processes that are optimized are scalable, allowing businesses to grow without a proportional increase in sales resources.
Steps to Optimizing Your Sales Process
Once you have drafted a plan for your sales process, the next step is to optimize it to take your sales efficiency to the next level. As a result, it will boost your overall ROI.
Document Your Sales Process
Clearly define and document your sales process to ensure alignment and consistency. The documentation allows you to continuously optimize your process and helps in onboarding and training new team members.
Align Sales & Marketing
Foster collaboration between sales and marketing teams to ensure that your sales teams have all the necessary material they need to target the prospects. The best strategies to align both the teams could include weekly/bi-weekly meetings, co-creating buyer personas, sharing quarterly reports, and giving marketing access to sales process documentation.
Define the Buyer Journey
The most effective way to define your buyer journey is conducting sessions with your sales representatives about how potential customers progress through the sales pipeline and funnel. Some of the key questions you can ask include:
- Which designations are decision makers in a specific B2B.
- Are they typically involved in buying decisions, or can they influence the purchase?
- How do they trust the business and how can we build our credibility?
- How many touchpoints do you need?
These questions will help your business determine numerous aspects of your overall sales process, allowing the sales team to know what to expect with each sale.
Create Effective Sales Collateral
Develop high-quality sales materials that align with the buyer’s journey to deliver the right message at the right time. Some of the best examples of sales collateral include: one-sheets, case studies, articles, white papers, brochures, email templates, presentations, and demo videos.
Identify Pipeline Bottlenecks & Leaks
It would be best to craft detailed ideal customer profiles (ICPs) as reference to ensure you only target buyers that are suited to your offer. Ideally, a high percentage of potential customers who enter your sales funnel should become sales-qualified leads.
However, if this does not happen, there is something wrong with your sales process that needs to be fixed. Furthermore, if your leads consistently fall away after entering the funnel, you may have a pipeline bottleneck or leak.
The best way to fix this is by having a good lead nurturing strategy. You must gain new leads and nurture them over time so that when they are ready to buy, they’ll knock on your door.
Be Prepared to Face Any Objections
Prepare for objections related to pricing, solutions, or competition. Keep track of common objections, learn frameworks for handling them (e.g., LAARC: listen, acknowledge, assess, respond, confirm), and use analogies to portray the value of your solution.
Create Emotional Connections Through Storytelling
Use storytelling to create emotional connections instead of just listing product features. Share your brand’s origin story, show how your solution has helped similar customers, and make your prospects the hero by focusing on their use case.
Learn How to Follow-Up Effectively
Master the art of follow-up, balancing persistence with patience. Find the right balance between staying top-of-mind and avoiding spamming your prospects.
Measure KPIs
Sales representatives must know which specific sales Key Performance Indicators they are working with. Also, managers must provide continuous feedback to each of their reps and update their team on progress being made. Metrics should be prioritized based on their importance to the sales performance, rather than just vanity. These include:
- Sales cycle length
- ACV per demo
- Win rate
- Average Selling Price (ASP) vs. product mix
- Seller productivity by tenure
Of course, every business in every industry will prioritize different metrics.
Leverage Customer Feedback
In B2B sales, it is easy to think of prospects and leads as faceless entities, or numbers on a spreadsheet. Yet the process of turning potential customers into buyers is all about human interaction.
For example, one bad conversation or failure to follow up is all it takes to lose trust. No promotion or sales technique can overcome bad experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. To avoid such drawbacks, it is essential to listen to your customers.
Consider setting up interviews, surveys, and focus groups on social media to discover frustrations that are common among your customers.
Conclusion
To optimize sales, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. It will take a lot of trial and error to figure out what works best for your products or services. However, it is important to track progress and KPIs, to ensure you adjust the process with time.
