What does the sales process have to do with hit-or-miss marketing? It’s a fair question, but the truth is marketing and sales should be intertwined at every company. What marketing does impacts sales and what sales does impacts marketing.
So if you don’t have a sales process – or if you have one but it’s not being followed by everyone – it will ultimately lead to hit-or-miss marketing.
When a company misses its sales goals, especially if it happens over multiple quarters, it almost always triggers hit-or-miss marketing.
On the one hand, it’s understandable. When sales and revenue goals aren’t being met, alarms go off. Leadership looks for a reason and demands a response to course correct.
On the other hand, the reasoning is often reactive, triggering an impulsive response and overreaction from leadership. And typically that overreaction spins back on marketing – because the answer to more revenue must be to generate more leads.
The pressure and demands cause marketing to deviate from its plan or hastily launch into something half-baked and not thought through because it’s supposed to be the fix that produces more leads and helps the company hit its sales goals.
The Culprit Could Be Your Sales Process
While it’s wise to consider every angle and review every facet of the revenue generation process, the issue rarely has anything to do with marketing. It almost always has to do with sales. Sometimes it’s the salespeople, but more frequently it’s the sales process or lack of one.
How do you know if you have a true sales process? If you don’t have a visual, documented sales process that is mirrored in your CRM platform and everyone on the sales team follows religiously, you don’t have a sales process.
Even if you have a formal agreed-upon sales process, you may have the wrong one for how people buy today.
Here are a few tips to ensure you have the right sales process and everyone is following it.
Tip 1: Align It With How Prospects Buy
Your sales process should align perfectly with how your prospects make their purchase decision. All human beings are controlled by their buy button. This part of the brain also controls the fight-or-flight reflex, which means your sales process MUST help prospects feel safe.
The best way to align your sales process to this human condition is to ask a lot of questions and make the process about them, not about you.
How can you help them?
What information do they need from you to feel smart?
How can you guide them along their buyer journey so they make a safe purchase decision?
Create a process that does this and you’ll close a lot more customers.
Tip 2: Create a Remarkable Experience
In today’s ultra-competitive environment, your sales process must deliver a remarkable experience. This is where you should be thinking like Disney. How do you insert a number of little WOWs into your sales process? Some of the ways that we do this are by:
This carefully curated experience helps us stand out when they compare us to our competition. You need to do something similar.
Tip 3: Establish a Sales Scorecard
Create a scorecard and measure how your reps are doing at working prospects through the process. For example, you should know the conversion rates at each stage in your sales process by rep and for the entire company. Each month, work to improve those rates. You should also know how long it takes from first touch to the final signed agreement and work on ways to shorten your sales cycle.
By improving the conversion rates across all the stages of your sales process and shortening sales cycle days, you can dramatically improve your company’s ability to hit its sales quota goals every month.
When you’re not hitting sales goals, there’s a lot of pressure to find a fix and do so quickly. But the worst thing you can do is surrender to a knee-jerk reaction. While it may feel good in the moment to believe you have a solution and are taking meaningful action, jumping to conclusions and rushing from fix to fix rarely solves anything. More than likely, you’ll find yourself at the same crossroads in a few months’ time.
Before pressing your team to provide increasingly more leads, take a close look at your sales process and how you’re managing the leads you’re already generating.
What To Do Today: If you have a documented sales process, review it with fresh eyes. Is it as good as it could be? Could you make improvements? If you don’t have a documented sales process, create an outline of one. Workshop it with your team and refine it until you have a final process that everyone agrees to implement and follow.