Building a detailed sales strategy is the backbone of your business’ success. A documented sales process keeps your sales team on track, let them understand their target customers and tailor their approach to their needs. Most importantly, it minimizes human error and boosts the overall performance of your sales team.
Here is how small businesses should manage B2B sales processes.
Set Clear Milestones and Identify the Critical Sales Activities
To know whether your sales processes are moving forward, you need to set clear milestones to keep you on track. This is where you need to start thinking like your customers and ask yourself what they need to do to take the desired action.
The next step is, of course, to select key sales activities that will take you closer to achieving the goals you’ve set. Here are some common activities your salespeople will perform, such as:
- Sales lead generation
- Qualifying leads
- Making initial contacts
- The sales meeting
- Dealing with customer resistance
- Closing the sale
- Effective account maintenance
Sure, these steps can be tailored to your business’ needs and expectations. But, there is just one thing you should keep in mind. When making a list of your key sales processes, make sure you leave room for discussion. By planning everything to the tiniest detail, you may make it difficult for your sales reps to execute your plan. Always give them the opportunity to express their creativity, use the steps they consider effective, and adapt their sales activities to their customers’ needs.
Create a Sales Forecast
Managing complex sales processes is all about making rational, data-backed decisions. And, this is where sales forecasts shine. Your goal is to consider your previous sales, assess the market growth/shrinking, your products, seasonal demands, and target audience. This way, you will prepare yourself for potential problems and be able to take immediate steps to solve them.
For example, if you’re moving to a new location, raising prices or changing your product design, your sales may suffer. In this case, you need to boost your marketing efforts ahead of time and secure additional financing options like debt consolidation or small loans to support you in times of crisis.
Gather the Right Information
Now that you’ve determined your main goals and made the list of the key activities your salespeople should take, the next step is to collect the data relevant to your business. This type of information will help you understand the main strengths and weaknesses of your sales process and help you get the most out of each sales opportunity. Here is the information you should capture.
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Segment Your Target Audience
Before your sales reps reach out to a potential customer, they need to understand their preferences, expectations, and problems. Most importantly, they need to try to get a rough idea of their customers’ financial state. In other words, customer segmentation helps them determine whether a lead is relevant to them and tailor their approach to the customer’s needs.
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Know Who’s Involved in the Sales Process
Business-to-business sales processes are layered and they’re rarely done by one person. For example, if you’re selling smart home systems to a home automation company, this process will probably include a whole team of people, from engineers to financial and legal employees. To sell a product, you need to know who exactly manages the budget and assesses the value of the offer and who influences the decision.
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Set Appropriate Timing between Goals and Activities
This is an incredibly important step, as it determines the success of your sales process. Sometimes, even if your sales team is moving forward with the sales process and things look great on the paper, your sales results may still be poor. The reason for this is simple- your employees and your customers are not on the same wavelength. Precisely because of that, your salespeople should map the customer journey effectively and make sure there is the appropriate timing between the milestones they’ve set and their activities. This will help them understand whether their sales process is making progress or not.
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Spy on Your Competitors
In today’s overly competitive B2B world, you need to know who your major competitors are and keep track of them. Competitor research will let you understand the major mistakes they’re making to avoid them, as well as replicate their most effective selling strategies. Above all, you will be able to see who their customers are and try to win them over.
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Update Your Sales Strategy Continuously
A sales strategy isn’t something you can set and then totally forget about it. You need to constantly assess it to see what’s working and what's not. Here are the critical sales KPIs you should track regularly:
- Monthly sales growth
- Average profit margin
- Sales opportunities
- Sales target
- Sales per rep
- Product performance
- Sales by the contact method
- Customer lifetime value
- Average conversion rate
- Retention rates
Over to You
If you still don’t have a documented sales process, now it’s time to rethink your strategy. By building a solid strategy, you will make your sales processes more consistent, improve your sales reps’ performance, and stand out in the sea of your rivals. Above all, you will be able to focus on those strategies that work and give your bottom line a boost.
How do you manage your B2B sales processes?
A digital marketer from Sydney. Works as a blogger, Senior Editor for Bizzmark blog and a lecturer at Melbourne University. Tweets industry related articles.
