Ideas!

“How Mature Is Your Company’s Sales Process?”

To answer that question, start by thinking about the “maturity” of your own personal sales process.  Recall your first few months as a sales rep.  More than likely, your early successes were due mainly to determination, hard work and your gut instincts. You, like every other rookie rep, started out at the instinctive level of sales process maturity.

As time passed, you were astute enough to recognize that some sales techniques and tactics worked better than others.  Like any “maturing” rep, you consciously focused on executing the tasks that consistently produced results.  You moved up to the repetitive level of sales process maturity.  Perhaps without knowing it, you became a student of “Sales Best Practices”.  You not only repeated the things that worked for you, you studied others and emulated the things that worked for them.

Research shows that only about 15% of sales reps ever move up to the methodical level.  This minority takes the time and makes the effort to write down the entire sequence of events that consistently leads to superior sales performance.  If you haven’t tried this, it’s a whole lot tougher than it sounds.  (As an example, the YPS Methodical Sales Process has 14 groups of activities, each with 15 to 35 discrete tasks.)  If you have tried, you’ve experienced the profound superiority that a “Best Process” has over a collection of “Best Practices.

Not many reps ever get to the measured level.  These few not only maintain a written, evolving, improving “Sales Best Process”, they have defined (and they use!) performance measurements for each major step along the way.  They are far, far beyond just tracking number of calls made, proposals in process, revenue year-to-date, etc.  They have a system in place to record, track and report on the quality and quantity of as many as fifty unique sales tasks.   (…and - believe it or not - without creating a time-burning, administrative burden.)

Despite my continuing search, I have yet to find a systemic (or ultimate) level sales process.  I’m certain, though, that there’s one out there.  Somebody has figured out how to implement an automated, simple-to-use, painless, self-tuning, self-correcting process that never fails.

So what’s the point?  Quite simply, getting both your reps and your company to the next level of sales process maturity is an imperative.  It’s a fast path to real payoffs in faster revenue growth, higher margins and better training.  Take it up a notch!  Do it purposefully!  Start now!  Get it done this year!

Think about it…