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How you build a Process Driven Sales Effort

Written by: Alan McLaren

Article Overview: A brief overview of the elements of a good sales process - critical for all sizes of business.

How you build a Process Driven Sales Effort

At the core of every successful organization is an intense focus on the customer. The challenge is to service the customer while providing the profitable revenue that all stakeholders demand. Often there is misalignment between the core mission of the organization and the “feet on the street”. Successful organizations close that gap.

Many organizations that are poised for the next tier of revenue and profitability growth need some changes to their Sales Systems to maximize their efforts. As organizations mature, the "we've always done it that way" method is not as effective as it once was. Competition, commoditization of offerings and other factors impact the bottom line.

Below are a few areas to examine in your company to help your sales effort.

How cohesive is the Sales and Marketing plan? How often do you review your strategy? Many businesses create silos around Sales and Marketing. How many times have you seen negative attitudes develop between these two critical teams? Marketing cannot be successful without sales input and effective communication is critical to ensuring sales can execute on mutually developed strategies.

What sales methodology do you use to ensure repeatable behaviors and common language with the sales organization? Is your sales training consistent with the sales process methodology? Do your sales activities map to your clients buying behavior?

Have you optimized the structure to ensure the appropriate support for your team? Do you have the right sales associates servicing the right clients? Do you have the correct mix of managers to reps? Are your territories over-serviced or under-serviced?

A strong Sales culture is a determination of sales performance and culture is a result of good management. Look to your sales culture for clues into the functional areas that are actionable.

What key activities are you measuring to determine if things are on track? What gets measured gets done. Inspect what you expect, or you will not get the results your company demands. Do you have a Performance management process?

Sales behavior is determined by compensation direction. Are you getting the behaviors you expect? Are you paying too much relative to revenue or gross margin metrics? Are you underpaying relative to industry best practices? Is your bonus structure providing the right incentives?

Is training part of the culture or an afterthought? Do you have an effective new hire sales training program? Many companies pay lip service to their new hires. They have a stringent hiring process, get the new employee excited about joining the company and then on day one treat the new employee as a distraction.
Determine what internal resources you can use for training and find out if you need to outsource some of the training functions.

Do you have a Sales Automation system? Does it drive you or is it an effective tool used to improve communication, assist with the sales process and enhance customer service? Are your Sales Representatives using the tool? Is it part of their job description, has it been mandated by management?


The #1 reason sales teams succeed or fail is Sales Management. How much effort are you spending in this area? Coaching, training and mentoring this position is critical for long term success. Many Sales Managers are hired because they were the best Sales Representative. Many companies have experienced this critical error and lived through the poor results.

Obviously, this is just a snapshot of the items to look to see what is applicable for your business. No matter what size of business you have, these elements are important to integrate to ensure your sales process is tight. A tight sales process is critical to understanding what works and does not work. Otherwise, it is a hit and miss prospect. Selling is a tough nut at the best of times – having a consistent sales process makes it a little easier to define areas of opportunity so you can repair them when things are not working well.

Happy Selling…

Alan McLaren
Infinity Communications Inc
alan@2infinity.ca

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