What is the Best Sales Process For Your Company

All companies exist on the market selling something in the form of products and services to their customers. The sales process is something that will bring rewards for all other processes in your company.

Different companies will require different sales processes. It will be based on what type of products and services you are selling, how you are selling, and what type of sales channels you are using to sell your products and services.

Generally speaking, most of the sales process steps covered in this post can be implemented in different sales environments. For example, sometimes meetings will not be required, especially if you sell online. But, you will need the presentation that when it comes to online selling will be your sales copy where you are explaining what your customers will get for their money.

Here, I would like to present the six steps sales process that can be easily adjusted according to your needs. These are only basic steps for the starting point ideas, and in many cases, you will need to adjust them to reflect your own company.

Sales Process Step #1: Gain Knowledge

Everything will need to start with this step. Without strong knowledge about your customers, all the next steps will fail, and the sales process will not bring desired results.

Think about what will happen if you don’t know your customers.

• You will target the wrong customers.
• Focusing on wrong customers will make you lose money, time, and efforts of your sales staff.
• Your sales process will have more unsuccessful sales attempts instead of successful ones.

So, start to systematically gain knowledge about your current and potential customers. Learn as much as possible about them because this is one of the most important steps in your sales process. This step will be the basis on which will depend all other steps.

Sales Process Step #2: Plan Next Steps

The next step of your sales process will be planning. Now that you have already gained knowledge about your customers, you will need to decide what will be the next steps you will need to take.

From the first step, you know that there are different customers with different needs, desires, wants, and habits. Here are some basic things you will need to do in this step:

• Based on the facts from the first step, segment customers around their similarity related to their needs, desires, wants, practiced way of communication, places where they are, and other similar things.
• Design your communication channels for each segment of customers.
• Prepare procedures for the ways they will be contacted and communicated. These procedures will also contain sales scripts.
• Create time frames and sequences for the different communication techniques you will use.
• Decide how you will use feedback to improve current procedures.

Sales Process Step #3: Contact Customer

This step is a practical implementation of everything you have done in the previous two steps. If the previous steps are preparatory steps in your sales process, with this step, you start doing things starting with simple contacts.

Contacting customers can be made in different ways. You can contact them through phone, email, direct mail, Skype, and so on.

Here are some things you can do in this step of your sales process:

• Choose the group of customers you will contact.
• Use contacting procedures you have designed in the previous step.
• Start contacting customers.
• Start recording everything related to what you have done and the customer’s responses.

Sales Process Step #4: Agree Meeting

This step is optional because some companies don’t need one on one meetings to close the sale. But, if you need a meeting, the biggest priority in the previous step will be to agree on the meeting with the potential customer.

So, if you agree to meet with your customers, you will need to prepare enough for the next important steps to close the sale. Here are some things you can do in this step of your sales process:

• Gain additional knowledge about the specific customer with whom you will meet.
• Prepare different strategies for different possible situations.
• Decide what you will talk about related to sales, but also something related only to your potential customer.

Sales Process Step #5: Presentation

The fifth step in your sales process is the presentation.

The presentation step can be the practical presentation of the features of your products and services or simply explaining the benefits your potential customers will gain using them.

Sales Process Step #6: Closing Sale

If everything you did in the previous steps is implemented in the right way, this is the last step that will lead to closing the sale.