Simplify Your Sales Process

• Posted August 3rd, 2011
• By Bradford (bio)
• Filed under: Using BatchBook

What is the biggest ‘bummer’ you have when it comes to sales? Is it missed opportunities? How about not having enough time to pursue new sales? Maybe you feel you can’t ever get up to full speed because you have so many little tasks to do throughout the day?

At its core, sales is pretty simple. Identify a qualified lead, take time to build some trust, book the sale. That’s not to say it is ever easy. There are always a lot of moving parts involved in a successful sale. The better you can manage those parts, the more sales you can make.

Avoid unnecessary steps

The first key to making your sales process simpler and easier to manage is to make it as straightforward as possible. Do not add any unnecessary steps, such as making sales reps fill out onerous reports every step of the way. A simple sales process is easy to track without a lot of extra data entry on the part of the sales team.

Think of this in the terms of making a sale. What information is important to track in order to make the sale? Well, there is obviously the customer information, including any product preferences. It is also important to record any communication with the customer. It also makes a lot of sense to classify where each customer is in the sales process. Are they a warm lead, have you already had a meeting with them, are they waiting on a proposal, etc.? Tracking where each customer is in your sales process will help you focus on the most important opportunities first. In Batchbook, you can keep track of your entire sales process using a SuperTag and a few custom fields, such as a multiple-choice field which helps you designate where in the sales process each contact is.

What you probably don’t need are progress reports for each step, lists of the contacts that each rep has contacted for the day/week/month, or sales projection reports. These things may be important to a manager, but they don’t necessarily help you get sales. So don’t waste precious sales time on these management level reports. Besides, if you have a simple sales process, Batchbook makes these things easy enough to track without any extra reporting effort from the sales team. For instance, if you use a SuperTag to track your leads, you can quickly create a list of all contacts who are at a certain stage of your sales process.

Focus your attention on tasks that result in getting the sale

Thinking in terms of simplicity can really help you focus on sales. So put your sales hat on, or sit down with your sales team, and brainstorm. What information would really help to book more sales?

I think you can get it down to just two things. First, how interested is the customer (cold, warm, hot, burning hot tamale), and second, where are they in the sales process (call it a funnel if you must).

Using SuperTags to sort your customers by where they are at in your sales process will help you quickly determine the most important things to do. Get in the habit of making sure every follow up is done, every meeting is booked, every proposal sent out quickly, and ever contract is signed, and the rest will be just details.

It really is quite simple. Classify your contacts properly and you will know what sales tasks to do every day. You can prioritize according to what will give you the best chance of making a sale.

Block out your time to focus on specific tasks

If you have your contacts classified properly, you can start to take advantage of time blocks to get more done. A time block is simply a time period during the day where you focus on just one thing. This means no email or Twitter (unless that is what you are working on). Taking out a block of time to only make follow up calls is far more productive then trying to sprinkle them throughout the day. Same with any other sales task you perform.

The trick, of course, is to be so organized that you can take advantage of these time blocks. That organization doesn’t have to be hard, though. Your sales process should be so simple and easy to track, that you can instantly pull up list of people who need follow up, who are late getting a contract signed, or anything else related to your sales.

It needs to be simple so that it gets done. It really must make sense to the person doing the sales. If the sales rep can see the benefit, and it is easy, the tracking will get done. So take a scalpel to your sales process and simplify, simplify, simplify.