The A to Z of Small Business Sales - SP for Sales Process - Adopting a formal Sales Process and adapting it to your business
By Norm Tucker
May 3, 2006
Why do you need a sales process? The answer: It will increase your sales by 15% to 45%.
What is a sales process? It is a road map that makes you aware of opportunities, of choices, of approaches, of the steps, of the needs to getting and keeping customers. To be aware of the sales process is to be aware of where you and the customer are in terms of the sale and to be aware of the discipline required to succeed.
I suggest to you if you are not fully happy with your present sales results and your present sales staff (including yourself) you should ‘think about and look at’ your sales process. Sales are the heart of a company. Without the beat or the ring of the cash register, the company fails.
How can you be taking advantage of all opportunities without a formal process, without practising the process, without improving the process, and without giving it any attention? You should think about sales and sales process every day. It should be part of a dialogue - not a rant when a perceived sale is lost - with your staff every day.
Sales are about growing. Do it right. Be disciplined. Train and follow up and get feedback.
When I ‘googled’ sales process, I found 330 million entries. In finding a process that will help you, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. There’s no shortage of information out there - too much actually - and there are many books, training courses and seminars available. The question is if you want to change your present approach what should I do and where should I start?
I have always been most successful when organized and when understanding what I am doing and why. Ongoing success always depends on getting good, honest feedback, listening to it, and over time incorporating everything I learn into new understandings and approaches that help me do better.
Is it a particularly novel idea to know what you’re doing? Is it a useful approach? Well, that what a sales process is all about. Why be an amateur?
I first became aware of a sales process from a friend who was a national sales manager for a high end electronics distributor. He introduced me to the Counsellor Selling Sales Process. It’s a process used today in the audio-video retail industry and elsewhere. In this process sales people are ‘counsellors’ who help prospective customers through what they call “the difficult process of buying wisely”.
The Counsellor Process sees sales as problem solving. The customer’s purchase is a need to solve a problem. The sales person builds towards a sale by establishing trust, revealing the problem, helping to solve the problem and offering support.
My first response to the Counsellor Process was “Ah-ha!” sales is not just a sleazy approach to making a sale. There’s method, there’s relationship, there’s care and there’s value. And it made sense and fit with my personal values.
Another process is Conceptual Selling. A book with this title by Robert Miller, Stephen E. Heiman and Tad Tuleja describes this process. There are also seminars, audio visual, and on line seminars available. Conceptual Selling is pitched as a “unique face-to-face selling system...a definable process that makes you and your customer partners in each others’ business success”.
The essentials of Conceptual Selling are getting information, giving information and getting commitment. The main principles of this system follow from a belief that “buying is a special case of decision making” and the customers buying decision is a series of “predictable and logical steps” that appear in a sequence and can be tracked. By following the system, the sales person will work with the customers decision making process and find a fit.
The book acknowledges over 120 national companies such as Bank of America, Dow Chemical and IBM so one assumes that the system is widely used in Corporate America.
A third approach is the Guest Sales Process which I discovered some years ago from reading “Stop, Ask, and Listen - how to welcome your customers and increase your sales” by Kelly Robertson.
The customer is treated as a guest. The sales approach is about acknowledging, finding needs, qualifying, building rapport, dealing with objectives and closing.
Ms. Robertson offers us these nuggets of information that differentiates sales pro from an average Joe or Jane:
Pro says: “How can I help someone today.”
Joe says: “I gotta sell something to someone today.”
Pro: “Focus on helping customers solve a problem or issue.”
Joe: “Focus on closing the sale.”
Pro: “Cultivates relationship.”
Joe: “Gets through sale.”
Pro: “Generates high levels of sales.”
Joe: “Struggles with targets.”
Counsellor Sales, Conceptual Selling and the Guest process have many features in common, such as:
- Build relationships.
- Solve problems.
- Listen.
- Consciously move through and back and fore through a process.
- Success depends on awareness.
- Sales person is in control but ensures the customer is also in control.
- Respect customer.
Who would have thought that silence is an integral part of the Sales Process. Well it is, and much more.
You have heard of the book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus - A practical guide for improving communication and getting what you want in your relationship” by John Gray. The Sales processes suggested earlier are precisely about communications and getting what you want.
However these processes will not work if you conduct your business like a military campaign. The downside to corporations and big business is they run the company like a war. They talk about win-win but it is mostly talk. Competition is a battle. Policies and procedures are like battle plans. Managers are like platoon leaders. Soldiers, in the field, do as they are told or they are fired.
You can choose to run your business that way with all its stress and angst, or you can choose a relationship model. One of the great things about being in business for yourself is that you can choose. Business is not war. Why run it that way? Why pick the military model?
The military model always puts rules above creativity; orders above affirmations; combat above collaboration; organization ahead of individual; reacting to an event above responding to a need; short term targets ahead of long term growth; forcing change above allowing and adapting to evolution; power and winning above caring and sharing. A military style organization always causes what is euphemistically called ‘collateral damage’. It’s the nature of the beast. Why go that way? Why follow a military model?
The military model reminds me of the Grand Old Duke of York who “marched his troops to the top of the hill and he marched them down again.” The corporate model for this up and down march is the Bell Curve. Businesses start up, grow, peak, lose market share, die. The corporate world is a world of more, better, faster, burn out, shrivel, die.
With a relational style of doing business, your business will continue to grow, to adapt and to thrive. There will be no wars. A military style cuts trees. A relational style grows trees. You choose. As an owner of a small business you can choose your own path and start making your own transitions.
If you examine a ten year old list of Fortune 500 companies, you’ll find that nearly half of them no longer exist. If you look at books about Marketing and Sales, you will find they are exclusively for big business. They are all written for and follow the military-hierarchical style of organization.
A small business owner can benefit from a communication oriented sales process that shares information, builds relationships, actively listens, enables understandings and solves customer problems as opposed to a more tradition corporate style ‘battle plan’ approach.
Earlier in this article I wrote ”The question is if you want to change your present approach what should I do and where should I start?”
I would start by buying and reading two books: “Conceptual Selling” and “Stop, Ask and Listen”. From this reading, I would develop three basic priorities for YOUR PERSONAL change (not somebody else’s, not your employees, not your business - YOU) and start working with them. Here’s two suggestions:
1. Become aware. Build your capacity for awareness. Start asking, listening and learning. Stop talking and teaching. Appreciate your own silence.
2. Learn from everything you do and from everybody you talk to.
Following a few months of working on your priorities, you might consider your next steps. If you have employees, buy them one of the books and get their feedback and suggestions. Then start making the changes together. You use change first however otherwise you will be recognized as practising hypocrisy.
“Be the change you want to see.” (Gandhi)
A final word on Sales Process”. How much time you spend on each sale depends on the type and value of products and services. Once you start adapting your process to building relationships with customers, remember you must build relationships with employees. Work on the time element together, but don’t sweat this detail initially. Let it evolve. Each person will do it differently. Each customer will be different and have different needs. Why create unnecessary rules?
Let me leave you with a final thought. I talked about the Sales Process as being a communication approach to solving a customer problem or need. Let me suggest that 100% of your problems, indeed any problem, can be solved or transformed into a good opportunity through communication, and only communication. Important parts of communication are listening, awareness and silence.
I caught myself this morning already ignoring those important components of listening, awareness and silence while conducting a monologue that needed to be a dailogue.
Future articles in the next two months include:
- The Essentials of Counsellor Sales Process
- Implementing a Sales Process
- Processes and Creativity
- Managing Change
- Communications Choices
- Why You Need to Separate Your Role as Owner From Your Role as Owner.
In the meantime, I will be glad to respond to your questions.
The A to Z of Small Business Sales - SP for Sales Process - Adopting a formal Sales Process and adapting it to your business - To learn more about this author, visit Norm Tucker's Website.
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See also two other sites:
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