If you want to thrive as a business, it’s not enough to make sales on the regular. No, if you really want to succeed, you need to be making quality sales. So, how can you improve deal quality? That’s the million-dollar question.
Well, here’s a billion-dollar answer: It’s all about sales process management.
Sales process management involves strategizing, optimizing, and standardizing your sales team’s approach to selling. When done right, it can help you achieve higher levels of operational effectiveness and consistently exceed your team’s quota.
With that said, proper sales process management is far from simple—if it were, every business would already be doing it. But if you’re willing to put in the work (and we really think you should ), you’re bound to see results.
10,000 ft view of sales process management
Let’s dive right into what that work entails.
Whether it’s a RevOps manager, SalesOps or sales enablement manager, or simply a passionate Sales Manager, these process-oriented individuals strive to maximize their teams’ efficiency by optimizing various steps within the sales process. With that in mind, you should begin your optimization by mapping out the steps of your sales pipeline.
With these steps clearly defined, you can analyze them and identify any inconsistencies or bottlenecks that may be harming your team’s performance. After that, you’ll deploy solutions and monitor their results.
While sales process management is relatively straightforward, it does come with the following challenges:
- Accurately identifying the operational steps that need improvement
- Overcoming sales representatives’ resistance to change
- Ensuring ongoing adaptability to changing market conditions
- Identifying whether new tools or systems are needed to properly capture data
Sales process management checklist
To ensure your sales process optimization goes as smoothly as possible, start with a checklist of elements to address. As you reflect on your current process, consider the following:
- Training – Sales teams need ongoing training to ensure they stay on target with their goals and techniques.
- Analytics – Reviewing performance metrics for each stage of your sales process can help you identify areas for improvement.
- Technology integration – Having a seamlessly integrated tech stack can keep your sales representatives on track and organized every step of the way.
- Communication – Maintaining clear communication channels can foster a more collaborative environment across your sales department and the company at large.
- Alignment – Harmonizing your sales operations with your company’s overarching goals and objectives can amplify your bottom line while improving revenue visibility for execs.
- Adaptability – As customer demand and market conditions evolve, your sales strategies must be able to adapt accordingly.
- Culture – By instilling a culture of continuous improvement, your sales representatives will be more open to operational changes as they arise.
How to dramatically improve your existing processes
With those checklist items in mind, let’s take a look at some tactics for maximizing your operational effectiveness.
Understand who you’re selling to
The key to closing more qualified deals is demonstrating how your products or services solve your customers’ problems. Before you can do that, you need to understand their needs, pain points, and priorities.
Thus, sales process management involves clearly defining what problems your customers are trying to solve. Here are some questions you can ask during this stage:
- What job does your product or service fulfill for your customers?
- Do all of your buyers tend to work in similar industries or organizations?
- What are their most common job titles and demographics?
Using a combination of internal data and external research, you can answer these questions and use them to craft data-driven buyer personas.
Select the right sales process management tools
Your sales tech stack can make or break your operational efficiency, so it’s essential to scrutinize your current systems.
You’ll know your tech stack is properly optimized if it feels invisible. It should free up your sales team’s attention and let them focus on leads and customers—instead of administrative burdens.
If you’re looking to streamline your sales technology, Dooly’s sales management software can help you monitor your deals, centralize your data, and update Salesforce with ease.
Train and onboard sales teams
Sales teams need ongoing training to stay at the top of their game. After all, sales representatives are not robots—without regular reminders and easy access to the process requirements, they may forget to follow certain protocols or best practices.
Ongoing training can help your team master new aspects of the sales process and bolster their confidence. You can also use these training sessions as an opportunity to demonstrate workflows, request feedback from your sales team, and fine-tune your tactics even further.
Align your go-to-market efforts
While your sales, marketing, and customer success teams may operate in different departments, they still need to synchronize their messaging and create a seamless customer experience. You can promote cross-department alignment by:
- Hosting cross-department meetings
- Collaborating on buyer and user persona development
- Setting each department up on the same software systems
- Clarifying your lead qualification criteria with marketing
- Working with customer success to create an effective customer handoff process
- Analyzing their combined performance data
Along the same lines, you should coordinate your sales strategies and product feedback loops with your product development teams to deliver your customers a positive experience.
Streamline communication and collaboration
After aligning your strategies with your go-to-market teams, assess your communication within your sales department. You can keep everyone on the same page with the help of cloud-based dashboards and a robust CRM.
Here are some CRM best practices to promote more collaboration:
- Integrate your CRM with other tools in your tech stack to prevent silos and enhance efficiencies.
- Select a CRM system that’s mobile-friendly so team members can access sales data on the go.
- Enforce a standardized system for logging sales notes and customer interactions.
A solution like Dooly can help you clean your sales data to ensure your CRM and cloud-based dashboards are always accurate and up to date.
Commit to continuous process improvement
Successful sales teams never stop innovating their strategies. You can pinpoint new opportunities for improvement by analyzing the reasons behind pipeline velocity, win rates, and time-to-opp rates. Make a point to ask for feedback from your sales reps or leaders at the end of team meetings and one-on-ones.
Prioritize technology integration
By selecting tech tools that feature AI and automation, you can empower your reps to focus on selling—not on digital busy work.
Another benefit of integrated sales technology is that it can generate detailed analytics about your team’s performance, enabling you to optimize it over time.
And that’s what true sales process management is all about.
Transform your sales process management with Dooly
Sales process management is a vital part of every successful sales department. It can noticeably increase your deal quality by making it easier for both the sales team and your prospects to move through the process.
By following the strategies outlined above, you can use sales process management to boost your performance metrics and thrive, even in a constantly evolving sales landscape.
How Dooly can help
Dooly helps Salesforce users streamline their operations and achieve their best sales process. This innovative sales management software can help you centralize your customer data, automate key sales workflows, and enhance your data forecasting.
Some of Dooly’s latest features include:
- Deal and Account Vitals, which notify you when a deal or account needs attention.
- DealSpace, which provides reps and leaders with a customizable deal review environment to monitor and strategize on priority deals.
- Notes, which streamlines admin work by automatically syncing your meeting notes to Salesforce.
- Templates, which help your sales reps collect the same deal information every time, facilitating more accurate lead qualifications.
Book a demo to discover how Dooly can take your sales process management to the next level.
Join the thousands of top-performing AEs who use Dooly every day to stay more organized, instantly update their pipeline, and spend more time selling instead of mindless admin work. Try Dooly free, no credit card required. Or, Request a demo to speak with a Dooly product expert right now.
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