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How To: Build a Strong Sales Process

Here’s a practitioner-level breakdown of the mindsets, tools, and resources you’ll need to create a sales process that’ll help your team close more deals.

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sellers chat while examining deanonymized accounts

Chapters

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Elements of the B2B Sales Process

Chapter 3

Resources Your Team Needs Throughout the Sales Process

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

Selling and marketing are harder than ever. Old-school tactics are pushing modern buyers away, leaving revenue teams frustrated, inefficient, and unable to compete. In No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls, Latané Conant delivers the recipe for scalable, repeatable, data-driven sales and marketing strategies that work today. 

In this How To, we provide a practical, tactical dive into some of the strategies outlined in Chapter 5.

Sales processes are the lifeblood of successful businesses. A formalized process makes expectations clear for sellers, holds them accountable, and provides guidance across the entire experience.

But developing and executing an effective process is often a tall order for sales leaders. In this How-To, we’ll explore the key elements of successful process building, as well as the tools and resources you need to create a sales process that’ll help your business close more deals and drive growth.

Chapter 2

Elements of the B2B Sales Process

The most effective sales processes include these steps.

Prospecting

Prospecting is the method by which sellers identify potential customers and determine their level of interest in a product or service. This can be the most challenging step of the process, requiring an understanding of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), established buyer personas, and thorough research to understand your leads’ business needs and pain points.

Qualifying

When qualifying prospects, sales representatives must evaluate the prospect’s needs, budget, and decision-making authority to determine whether they are a good fit. At this stage, reps should contact prospects and ask the right questions to determine whether they are likely to move forward in the buying journey.

Creating a framework for qualification eliminates any gray area and guesswork — everyone follows the same methodology and criteria. Whatever framework you choose, ensure sellers are looking at these attributes:

  • Pain points that align with your solution
  • Purchasing power
  • A deadline and urgent need to purchase
  • Dedicated budget for new technology

Presenting

This is the moment of truth, when you meet with the prospect to showcase your product or service, highlighting its features and benefits and demonstrating how it meets their requirements. Storytelling helps a potential customer visualize how much easier their life will  be using your solution.

Sellers must also have effective materials to support an effective demo or pitch — plus access to information that facilitates customized presentations tailored to every prospect based on their unique needs and use cases.

Objection Handling

Within presentations and subsequent prospect conversations, it’s common that buyers will challenge a sales rep’s claims. To properly address questions or concerns, the seller must know enough about your product or service and its particular value for the potential customer’s business.

Critical to mitigating these concerns is a seller’s ability to practice active listening and think on the spot. Access to data and information about previous similar deals offers guidance about how to navigate objections. 

Closing

The excitement builds as sellers approach their goal: Converting the prospect into a customer. But even deals that reach this stage don’t necessarily close. For instance, the buyers may recognize the value of your solution but have sticker shock when presented with a contract.

This is where the art of negotiation comes in. Instead of putting your foot down without budging, it’s important to listen and be flexible during this stage — or you’ll kill the relationship before it has a chance to begin. The goal is to come to a mutually-beneficial contractual agreement.

Follow-up

While the legwork is done, nurturing the customer relationship improves satisfaction and retention. Customer churn can significantly hurt your business; keeping communication lines open to reinforce the value of your solution and ensure it continues meeting their needs and expectations.

This also offers an opportunity to cross-sell or upsell to customers and keep them in the loop about the latest updates and new products.

Chapter 3

Resources Your Team Needs Throughout the Sales Process

Throughout this complex process, you must support B2B sales reps so they can effectively execute. Collaborate with marketing, sales enablement, customer success, and other divisions of the business to ensure your team has the enablement tools it needs to succeed.

Training Materials

Creating comprehensive training is essential for any sales process. Reps must be trained on numerous topics to improve performance, including:

  • Company: Value prop, stakeholders, competitors
  • Product: Features, capabilities, target users, use cases
  • Process: Methodologies, expectations, goals
  • Customers: Industry, budget, key decision makers, common pain points
  • Competencies: Communication, empathy, objection handling, negotiation

Live, lecture-based training should focus on imparting key knowledge to sales reps. This can be done through annual SKOs and QBRs that set expectations and objectives for the months ahead.

Sprinkled between these larger meetings should be informal team gatherings that allow for open discussions, knowledge sharing, and the opportunity for reps to practice their skills in a safe environment.

Finally, provide reps with other on-the-go learning materials like bite-size videos, quizzes, self-assessment tools, and other materials that reinforce key concepts and keep your sales team up-to-date with the latest strategies and techniques.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool

A centralized system for account data, your CRM helps sellers manage their relationships with both existing and potential customers.

Some information is gathered automatically (form-fills, email and content engagement, etc.) and some can be entered manually (call notes, company/contact details, etc.) to track the status of sales opportunities and provide access to customer information for every member of the sales team.  

Content

Access to data is one thing — but using that data to facilitate outreach takes it to the next level. To effectively engage prospects, sellers need personalized marketing materials that demonstrate the value of their products and services across all stages of the sales cycle.

Work closely with marketing to develop brochures, case studies, product pages, sales decks, and other materials that can be easily tailored for different buyers based on their unique attributes and the business problem they’re trying to solve.

Along with customer-facing materials, sellers need scripts and playbooks to aid in navigating conversations. These provide consistency, help to guide interactions, and keep reps on track. Rather than using a canned script, playbooks should offer a level of flexibility for sales reps to make conversations their own.

Internal Support

Sales is a team sport. Although reps can often feel competitive amongst each other to hit their individual numbers, no deal is closed alone — and it’s up to leadership to create an environment that fosters teamwork.

Conduct team meetings to open up opportunities for sharing challenges, best practices, successes, learnings, and more. Encourage reps to practice pitches for peer review or provide each other feedback on real sales calls. Regular one-on-one coaching sessions allow managers to establish trust and guide each rep toward success.

It’s also important to promote cross-departmental collaboration. Make introductions to subject matter experts and colleagues from marketing, customer success, product, and other divisions that will serve as critical partners along the sales process.

Learn More in Our ‘No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls’ Resource Center

Interested in learning more about taking your sales and marketing effort to the next level by uncovering and targeting the accounts most likely to buy? Visit our Resource Center to find more How-To’s like this one inspired from the pages of Conant’s book.

All of 6sense’s proceeds from book sales go to GoodSense, the charitable arm of 6sense whose mission is to do our part for our community and beyond.

No Forms.
No Spam.
No Cold Calls.

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The 6sense Team