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How to Determine if Your Sales Process is Effective

Guest post by: Dave Kurlan

Article Overview: Attempting to reverse engineer your last sales cycle is a good way to uncover some of your sales weaknesses.

How to Determine if Your Sales Process is Effective

You know all about reverse engineering, right? The Chinese do...that's how they've copied all of the products that others have created and sold them into the mass market, gray and black markets too.

Technology companies tend to be quite good at reverse engineering. How else can you explain one company's game-changing leap in capabilities, and the short time it takes for their competitors to introduce similar, if not the identical capabilities?

Can you reverse engineer your sales calls?

OTHER THAN THE PART OF YOUR SALES CALL THAT INVOLVES PRESENTING, could you break down and explain, each step, strategy, tactic, question, response and milestone met, in the order they occurred, why they were chosen, and the resulting reaction of each occurrence,AFTERyou've completed an entire sales cycle?

If you can, congratulations. If you can't, it means the following:

• You don't have a formal, structured, optimized sales process or, if you do, you don't follow it very consistently;
• You are so involved in your sales call that you aren't in control of what you are doing, when and why;
• You tend to wing it;
• Whatever you are doing is not repeatable or scalable;
• You can't teach it;
• It's not indicative - you can't say, "if you follow these exact steps, reach these exact milestones, ask these specific questions, utilize these specific strategies and tactics and do so in this particular order you will get the business 75% of the time".

Try to reverse engineer your last complete sales cycle and let me know what happens when you do...

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Article Tags: sales analysis, sales calls, sales engineering



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