Diana May-JenningsWe’ve worked with a lot of door-to-door, canvassing, and field sales companies to use our sales app to solve some specific problems they’re encountering. Unfortunately, most companies are approaching their business without any significant strategy or plan.
This is making your job harder. Instead, teams need to target the source of the problem, the best way to start doing that is to identify existing issues, then build an adaptive sales process accompanied with technology that can structure and guide that process. Learn more about how to build your ideal sales process now.
What is a Sales Process?
A sales process is the series of steps a prospect takes to become a customer.
More importantly, it’s the most defining characteristic of a mature company. Most major sales maturity models identify “lack of system or process” as the main reason that a company is “immature” or “chaotic.”
This process will be different for each company, but there are universal steps that every door-to-door or field salesperson goes through as they successfully convert a prospect to a customer: they go out and knock doors, make contact, and close the sale. By focusing on these basic steps of your sales process, you can start to measure your team’s performance in more specific ways, allowing you to adjust, strengthen, and personalize your process as you go along.
Why Do I Need a Sales Process?
There are several reasons why you should have a sales process, especially in the world of door-to-door and field sales:
- A uniform system for your reps
- Faster, more effective onboarding
- Better vision of performance
- Make productive improvements
- Better customer experience
It doesn’t matter what sales industry you find yourself in, having a thought out sales process is going to be the best way to set you and your team up for long-term success. There’s a reason why all the major companies like to think of each step in their process; it eliminates a lot of the natural human error that can come from poor stat management, lack of communication, or difference in personal process.
3 Ways to Build or Fix Your Process
- Gather Data for a New Perspective
- Track Sales Rep Stats
- Create a Mobile Sales Process
In our experience, most door-to-door and field sales companies are in two camps:
- Companies have put off building a sales process because they don’t know how or think they don’t need one.
- Companies know they have a general sales process but they freely admit that they don’t really use it or it’s outdated.
Sales processes need continual optimization and improvement to encounter for changes that happen in the company or the market. Any business hoping to be successful needs to know that there is no replacement for a smart, evolving, scalable sales process. Let’s talk about crucial steps that have to take place as you build or update one.
#1 Gather Data for a New Perspective
You’re not going to start out with the perfect sales process, so just jump in to what you’re currently doing. Start by making everyone participate in data gathering. Reps need to be reporting what happens at every single interaction with a customer. This will give you a perspective of what’s happening in the field and a picture of what reps are currently accomplishing, succeeding at, and struggling with.
Work to build a company culture that demands this behavior. When you show your reps that they are also going to reap the benefits of an intelligent sales process, they’ll start doing it because they want to and they will come to expect the same behavior from each other.
#2 Track Sales Rep Stats
After you’ve started collecting data, you’re going to want to organize that data in stages to match your process. Let’s refer back to the basic sales steps mentioned earlier: doors knocked, contacts made, and overall sales.
The data from each of these steps tells you something unique about your salespeople:
- Doors knocked: This number tells you how hard a rep is working in the field. It’s straightforward—if a rep isn’t knocking enough doors then they’re not going to be selling anything.
- Contacts made: This stat tells you how strategically a rep is handling an area. You’ll know if they’re tracking their interactions and using that information to adjust routes so that they can get the most out of an area instead of simply knocking through it.
- Sales: How many sales your rep makes a pretty straightforward measurement of their success overall and in certain areas. If you’re not tracking this stat already, you should be.
#3 Create a Mobile Sales Process
The top teams all know that they need to invest in a mobile CRM that will support their workflows and give them a data-supported vision of their company’s performance.
Salesforce’s “State of Sales” report showed that high-performing sales teams are implementing a “smarter, faster sales process,” and are 2.7x more likely than under-performing teams to be using process automation.
For most of them, this technology is mobile. There are a lot of benefits to following the example set by these top teams. Mobile CRMs are essential to your data gathering as you start to build out your sales process. They’ll help eliminate all the time you’re currently wasting on other inefficient processes.
The best mobile sales apps will sync with other services and CRMs that you’re currently using, bringing all your data to the same place. They’ll also help you better understand and cater to the customer experience. Not to toot our own horn, but SalesRabbit is designed to do this for you.
What Does Your Sales Process Look Like?
No matter how good or bad you think your current sales process is, you should always be measuring and reevaluating your approach. Keep an eye out for trends that you and your reps are discovering. Be willing to subject your process to experimentation and trial and error. These steps will get you on track, but the truth is that it’s hard to give general advice on developing a sales process.
We’d love to talk to you more about a process that fits your team and show you the tech we’ve built that directs you towards stable growth, demo with us today.
