How Mature is your Sales Process?

by Todd Youngblood

The personal sales process of top sales executives is, in fact, quite sophisticated and mature.  It is the reason their rise to the top occurred.  Three variants of this question, however, are the critical ones to consider.  How mature is your organization’s sales process?  How mature is the sales process of each of your sales managers?  How mature is the sales process of each of your individual reps?

Assessing your answer to these questions is an important step in determining the overall value of a Sales Process Engineering effort.  The following discipline tool for measuring the quality – or maturity – of a sales process will help in doing so.

Every business process and every individual executing it grows and matures over time.  We all start out with nothing but instinct – applying the knowledge, experience and habits we brought with us.  Initial success comes from a combination of two things & two things only – hard work and luck. 

Stage two is the repetitive or best practices phase.  If it works, do it again.  If it works for someone else, copy it.  The theme for a rep or organization at this level is, “Try it!”  Becoming a student of sales and acquiring a collection of sales best practices are key activities.

Research shows that only about 15% of sales reps and sales forces ever get to the third or methodical level, the stage where the entire sales process is written down.  This, by the way, sounds easy only to those who haven’t tried to do it.  The 15% who have, appreciate the truly profound difference between a collection of best practices and the well-defined best process of the methodical level.

The fourth stage is based on the management principle that “If it’s not measured, it’s not managed”.  This stage implies being well beyond tracking the basics like revenue, sales calls made and expenses.  An authentic measured-level sales force keeps tabs on as many as 50 – preferably 100 or more - distinct process steps by rep and performs continuous statistical analysis on that data and tunes the sales process based on that analysis.  This level of detail provides a tremendous amount of insight and can truly super-charge a sales process and sales team.  Less then 5% ever make it this far.

Still fewer, only a handful really, can claim attainment of the fifth or systemic level.  This is where the sales management system literally monitors itself; not only responding to, but also anticipating the marketplace through automatic feedback mechanisms, making corrections to the sales process and tuning components and people as appropriate.