Salt, Surprises, and Sales Processes

“Well this deal is different? How? It’s different from your good deals that actually close?”

Boring is good when it comes to sorting, sifting, and separating the good deals—the qualified deals—from the dogs.

Your customers aren’t loyal until they’ve had a chance to leave and decided to stick around and renew with you.

You need a defined sales process with metrics.

As the founder/entrepreneur you may have mastery but not a process so it’s tough to scale.

Winging it doesn’t cut it.

You need enough process to help your team thrive and grow but not so much that it crushes them. This impacts everything your teams do, including your

  • Hiring decisions

  • Training efforts

  • Coaching strategies

Know who your buyers are and what makes them tick.

Meet them where they are.

This is the active research 

“Selling is about buying.” Mark Roberge

Don’t show up and throw-up. It’s not “alligator selling,” i.e. big mouth, small ears.

The Buyer’s Journey

  • Awareness

  • Consideration

  • Decision

Build your sales process that aligns with the Buyer’s Journey.

Identifying Your Sales Process

  1. Lay out the buyer’s journey for your target persona.

  2. Identify the places where they can’t move forward without help from a sales rep. These are the steps of your sales process.

  3. Define clear exit criteria for each step.

    1. Required

    2. Factual

    3. Inspectable

    4. Buyer-centric—the buyer must show interest and specific actions to move to the next step

The sale is not over when money changes hands.

Think about how you should conduct yourself to make the 2nd, 3rd,…10th sale to your customers.

Think about how you should conduct yourself to get referrals and testimonials from all of your customers.

Every customer can be a salesperson for you. Treat them—and your sales process—with that in mind.

The word-of-mouth marketing from your customers trumps ALL of your sales and marketing efforts.