Sales leadership is more than setting quotas and forecasting revenue. It’s about coaching and giving feedback. It’s about knowing what motivates your reps and providing the tools and resources they need to succeed.
Those are important questions to answer because an optimized sales process is:
The problem is that 81% of Sales and Marketing teams do not frequently audit their sales process, and opportunities are lost because problems are left unchecked.
Dooly and Saascend partnered to create this guide, based on a survey of over 500 sales professionals and insights from sales industry experts like Dooly CEO & Founder Kris Hartvigsen, Saascend CEO & Founder Craig Jordan, and Syncari CRO Scott Edmonds.
This guide will help you uncover what is inhibiting your sales process from operating at its full potential and provide solutions for what you can do to solve these challenges.
“Sales needs to have access to intelligence data and enablement material at their fingertips,” says Kris Hartvigsen, CEO, Dooly. “It is incrementally bad every time they have a moment where they don’t know an answer to a prospect’s question because then they are no longer seen as the trusted advisor.”
Although many daily repeatable tasks can be automated, most sales reps are still doing manual work. That means less time selling and closing deals.
Ask yourself: How much of your sales data is actually being used? What pieces of information are absolutely necessary versus nice to have during the sales process?
An overengineered process will slow your team down. It will also reduce their productivity, and potentially distract them from being able to focus on their high value work.
If reps don’t have even basic playbooks, the whole sales process becomes inconsistent and ineffective. If they don’t have a method to sell, they will wing it every time.
Source: Data Dwell
You need to become an above the line solution. Your product or service needs to be seen as an offering that is a need to have, not a nice to have.
“Quantify the importance of the problem that your product or service is solving for the prospect. Attach it to the dollars that it will cost them if they do not solve it.”
Scott Edmonds
CRO at Syncari
People buy from people that they trust. You position yourself as the trusted advisor with the wealth of knowledge that you bring and the value that you add to the individual in their role and their business.
“[Coach your team to] be empathetic to what their prospect is going through. Have a better understanding of how your solution fits into that equation to help the prospect succeed within their role.”
Craig Jordan
CEO at Saascend
Have a structure in place to spot the time wasters or zombies that will never actually pull the trigger to close deals. Discuss disqualification criteria that your team can use to be realistic with themselves and know when they need to remove a deal from the pipeline.
If by the 15th of the month a deal is not locked in to close by the end of the month (meaning that the rep cannot commit to the deal actually closing that month), then they should punt it to the next month, move out the close date, or kill it.
“If a deal is being kicked around from month to month and quarter to quarter, it is a sign that you are really not attached to an important pain.”
Scott Edmonds
CRO at Syncari
Mutual Action Plans are a structure that sellers can use to strategically align with a buyer, defining milestones, objectives, stakeholders involved, and timelines, so that everyone is on the same page. They communicate to the buyer that there is commitment involved from both parties throughout the buying process, and shows them that the seller is entering into the engagement with intention.
Data empowers sales managers for coaching and helps keep a sales team accountable. But reps would rather spend their time selling. A solution like Dooly can help them do both.
Craig Jordan gets creative to keep reps accountable for their Opportunity close dates. No close dates in the past or else, 10 push-ups.
Simplify and centralize as much as possible to reduce the amount of technical debt and context switching that happens in a sales rep’s day.
“Anything that will strip away the mundane and boring work that will allow you to stay in high value work, buy it.”
Craig Jordan
CEO at Saascend
Allow for creativity, keeping your sales process simple and flexible. Is your sales process a framework with latitude that your sales team can move within, or is it a rigid script that your team is holding onto like a life raft in the ocean? One that they will not let go of?
“If a deal is being kicked around from month to month and quarter to quarter, it is a sign that you are really not attached to an important pain.”
Craig Jordan
CEO at Saascend
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