Scott Porter Our own Zac Kerr chats with Ben from JobNimbus about how to stop sabotaging your sales team and how to improve your sales process. To make sure your team is set up for success and longevity in the sales industry you need to ask: what roles are important for reps to focus on, what data should be used to measure rep success, and is my sales process up-to-par for what results I want. Check out what Zac and Ben dive into here to improve and build-out your current sales process.
What Roles are Most Important for Reps?
Companies often have sales reps perform in roles that aren’t really part of their job description or they aren’t the best at performing. Doing this breaks your reps focus and isn’t in your best interest. According to Zac, the key roles that sales reps should focus on include:
- Prospecting to find new lead opportunities.
- Pitching those leads.
- Converting leads to closed accounts and new revenue.
So some questions to ask yourself as an organizer or sales manager are: how can you tell if your reps are being bombarded with tasks that can be automated or aren’t their job? Do you have a benchmark process with data that creates a repeatable outcome to measure rep success to? If you don’t use data in your sales process, see what data is useful when starting this step.
What Data Should You Use to Measure Rep Success?
Depending on what’s important to you and your company, these recommendations can change. But these data points are based on the three key roles of a sales rep. Using this method will help you break down the sales process in a way that isolates each rep and shows what they struggle with whether it be: prospecting, pitching, or closing. Here are some of the questions you need to be asking and recording data on:
- Prospecting: leads contacted, what is the outcome? What is their reason for signing or not signing?
- Pitching: what happened as a result of a certain pitch used. Did I qualify them? Measure your metrics and what happens with each individual customer.
- Closing: What was the specific outcome of this deal? Was the customer satisfied with your closing time frame?
Characteristics of a Good Sales Process
Although some sales methods can change from industry-to-industry, having a solid sales process is a great way to ensure that your reps have methods to close deals and your company will be successful. Here are some characteristics we find useful when building or improving a sales process:
- Be flexible, a good sales process should have rules but not be so constricting that sales reps can’t get creative and personalized with their approaches as needed.
- There’s a lot of background levers that reps don’t have to pull. Financially qualifying a customer should be something done in the backend so a rep knows they’re pitching a qualified customer and not wasting their time. DataGrid AI is a great example of knowing a customer’s financial status before knocking on their door.
- Be a ready-made product. A rep should be able to enter your organization and start thriving based on the sales process you’ve already used and found success with.
- Open to change. As a business scales and grows or as reps find kinks in the process, a good sales process should be subject to change to help your reps close more deals.
Check out the full video here:
Implement These Tips
To summarize this great chat: it’s best for an organization to have your sales reps work on the things they’re good at not working on the things that should be automated or should have a process separate from them. This is a great way to ensure that your reps stay happy, motivated, and free of tedious tasks that they shouldn’t be doing. If your sales process needs some updating, ask yourself the questions above and start using data to find out what works and what doesn’t. You can always chat with us about sales and your company if you’re in need of guidance and team management.
