I recently set out a challenge to my contacts on LinkedIn. I presentd my contacts across Surrey, Berkshire, Hampshire and Kent a simple challenge.
I challenged them to ask all their customer facing staff a simple question
“What is your understanding of our sales process?”
In theory everybody should be able to answer this question. And they should answer it pretty much in the same way- the way that the organisation has agreed.
But why, in practice, is it likely that they can’t all respond the same way?
The most uncomfortable reason is that there was never a tightly agreed sales process.in the first place. The sales team over the years has sort of grown a kind of process that works-ish. If that’s the case, whose fault is that? If the top director doesn’t know what a good sales process looks like, then he needs to get his sales director to work out one and then make it stick. And then it needs to be reviewed every now and again to make sure it reflects reality. Markets change, people change, products and offerings change, focus of the organisation changes. What was a good sales process for one division years ago isn’t necessarily the best one for all divisions now.
The next big reason why they can’t all agree on the sales process is because they haven’t all been trained in it. You might think it’s just the salespeople who need to be able to articulate it. Not so. Marketing and customer-facing operations people need to know it too. They need to know what the salespeople are looking for and what will happen to their data if it gets passed along.
But most salespeople don’t know their own sales process anyway, even it’s published and distributed internally. I recall working with an international IT company and asked what their sales process is. Only one person was able to send me the document that had been produced by their own organisation.
Which leads me to the next reason. Just because it’s published, doesn’t mean it’s interpreted correctly. That IT company I’ve referred to had a very clear diagram. But because “qualify” came so early and the rest of the diagram was about making sure the solution worked technically, it looked like the organisation wanted lots of quotes going out. The process absolutely did not say “send loads of quotes and follow them up”, but the diagram made it look like that was what the technical salespeople should be doing.
As you can probably guess, nobody took up my challenge. Or didn't admit that they couldn't get a straight consistent answer from their customer-facing staff. If you think about that for a moment, that is mind-blowing. Would you even attempt to draw up your accounts for the year, or deliver a technical solution for your top clients or indeed do ANYTHING in your organisation without a clear, consistent process that everybody knows and follows to the letter? So why is sales (the source of all your revenue,) any different?
What would happen if you asked all your customer facing staff “What is your understanding of our sales process?”. Would you be proud of their responses? Or would you suddenly go cold when you realise your revenue-earners are out there doing whatever they think is right for that particular deal so that you’ve got no idea what is happening, what is real, and when it’s likely to close?
