Defining Your Sales Process: The What, Why, When, Who, and How

The biggest obstacle that small businesses face to achieving successful software usage is defining the processes that they want to manage. Without a clear process, it is unclear how a piece of software should be configured and used. The value of all software is its ability to model a process and perform actions faster than what we could do without it. This guide will help us understand how to think about business processes so we can do the necessary prep work to be successful with a new piece of software.

Defining processes does not require any software to do. It can be done with pen and paper or a white board. If the task is difficult, it's because we're thinking about our work and activities in a new way. While we may not have standardized how we work in an official way, we may find that our work is fairly predictable and follows certain patterns. In some cases, we may feel that things are too disorderly for there to be a process. We may look at our team and see the same tasks being performed in different ways or a constant stream of ad hoc activities popping up that have to be dealt with as best they can.

The good news is that all we're doing is describing what our business does and how our team does it. If we don't know how a particular thing is happening, we probably have someone we can ask who works beside us.

Once we understand what we're doing, we are in a great position to dream up what we wish our business was doing instead. With clear goals, we'll be able to prioritize what parts of the business we want to work on and which processes will change.

To get a better grasp on processes, we just need to think about the What, Why, When, Who, and How:

• What: Naming a specific activity or process that we want to address

• Why: Defining a clear goal or outcome for the process we have named

• When: Defining the start and end points of the process; the trigger point and completion

• Who: Listing who's involved and what their role is in the process

• How: Breaking the process into small steps that include what tools or resources people will need to complete each step.
   

What: Naming the process

The first step to defining a process is naming one to map out. In this guide, we are going to focus on the sales process.
 

Why: Defining a clear goal

It is essential that we understand what the goal of our process is. Sometimes it is sufficient to have a goal that is very general. For example, we might say that for our sales process, our goal is to "increase sales." This is a fair starting point, but we may want to think about this a little more deeply. Are we willing to increase sales by any means necessary? Does this include employing predatory sales practices to make a quick buck? Or do we want to increase sales while also showing our customers that we value their business? Maybe we find this second idea too vague. Perhaps we want to increase sales and create repeat customers. Or even better, increase sales and create repeat customers through a high-touch sales model. Whatever it is that we decide on, we should take our goal as our mission.
 

When: The Start and End of the Process

Defining the start and end of a process allows us to understand the scope of what we are doing. Without a start and end, we are not describing a particular process. Specificity is what allows us to zoom in on something that we can think through and improve.

Sales processes can start and end in many different ways. Sales processes usually begin with a new lead.

A lead can be defined in many ways, which we'll talk about in the section below. For now, we'll say that a lead is a person who could be interested in purchasing a product. While we may have a small team without defined departments, the marketing and sales functions usually are the ones that touch leads. The relationship that marketing and sales have to leads varies by organization.

It is up to you to define when your sales process starts. Here are some common ways that marketing and sales functions handle leads:

• Marketing generates leads for sales to follow up with.

• Marketing generates leads and nurtures them, then passes warm and hot leads to sales for follow up.

• Sales is responsible for generating their own leads and will need to hunt for them on their own

Sales processes usually end after an agreement to purchase has been made. This agreement can be called a deal, potential, opportunity, sale, order, purchase, purchase order, etc. You can call this whatever you want, you just need to have it defined for yourself. In this guide, we'll call it a deal.

Once we have closed a deal successfully, we may say that our sales process has ended. A sales process usually ends when one of the following has happened:

• A purchase order has been signed

• Payment has been received

• Product or service has been delivered

• A verbal or written commitment has been reached

• A deal has been lost for some reason

Define for yourself the end of your sales process. This will be the stage in your process that everything will be built to achieve. It is also important to consider that defining the end of the process allows you to:

• Create clear hand-offs

• Measure your performance

• Refine your process

Who: Listing who's involved and defining roles

The easiest way to list who is involved in a process is to think about the goal or targeted outcome of the process and then the people who are involved. When thinking about people, we should try to think about their specific jobs, roles, or responsibilities.

In a typical B2B sales process, we can immediately distinguish between people we are selling to and our staff that is responsible for sales.

• Prospects: people we sell to

• Sales team: our staff who sells

We can now think more carefully about our prospects. We might realize that every person who expresses interest in our offering is not necessarily someone we can sell to. For example, someone may walk into a store without any real intention to buy. Or, someone may sign up for an informative newsletter we put out but not be interested in our products or services. We can call this group of people leads to differentiate them from our prospects, who we have a shot at doing a deal with.

• Leads, people who have expressed interest, but we do not know if we can sell to

• Prospects, people who have expressed interest who we know we can sell to

• Customers, people who we have sold to.

Since leads are the start of the process, we may need to think more about where they come from or how we get them. A typical B2B marketing team may rely on several channels to generate leads for their sales team:

• A "Contact Us" form on the website to receive inquiries

• Digital advertising campaigns on platforms like Google and LinkedIn that drive traffic to landing pages with specific web forms

• Offline advertisements like billboards and television ads that raise awareness, drive traffic to the website, and create inbound calls to our sales team

• Trade shows and event sponsorships where we collect business cards from attendees and lead lists from the event organizers

Meanwhile, when we think about our sales team, we may organize them according to their role in making a sale.

• Sales manager: oversees the team, distributes leads, ensures we hit performance, approves discounts

• Account Executive: sells to prospects

• Account Manager: stays in touch with customers to provide post-sale customer service and push cross-sells and upsells

• Lead Development Rep (LDR) / Sales Development Rep (SRD): follows up with leads to see if they might be a prospect, then passes prospects to Account Executives

In addition to these roles that are focused on winning a sale, we may also want to think about how we actually get paid. In some organizations, sales is responsible for sending invoices and collecting payment. In others, this is the job of accounts receivable. In our example, we will include invoicing and payment as part of our larger sales process:

• Accounts Receivable: turns approved quotes into invoices, sends invoices, and collects and records payment

So far, we have the people we are likely to find in a typical B2B sales process. Depending on your business, you may find that your sales process includes more people.

Let's take a typical car dealership as an example:

• Web Sales Rep: follows up with online inquiries or quote request to get them to the lot

• Sales Person: greets dealership visitors, shows cars, organizes test drives, handles negotiations, secures order

• Sales Manager: approves sales terms

• Finance Manager: secures financing and sells warranties

For businesses that sell directly to consumers (B2C), particularly e-commerce businesses, you may find no sales people and no prospects in the B2B sense. Your sales process may look more like the following:

• Website Visitor: anonymous person who visits our online store

• Lead: someone who has given us their email address in exchange for a discount code or signed up for a newsletter

• Customer: someone who has bought something from our website with a credit card

With a B2C sales process like this, you may invest resources in understanding website visitors' behavior so you can improve the performance of your online store. You may also create offers that will entice your visitors to buy, allowing you to learn about who they are in the process.

How: The steps and resources involved

Now that we have our goal, scope, and the categories of people involved, we can begin breaking down the steps that get us from the start of our process to the end. For the sales process we're building, we can know we have:

• Leads, people who have expressed interest, but we do not know if we can sell to

• Prospects, people who have expressed interest who we know we can sell to

• Customers, people who we have sold to

Above, we defined the different ways that we generate leads. In our example, each method relied on the marketing team generating inbound leads for the sales team. Therefore, the first step in our sales process is receiving the lead, whether it was through a form, email, or phone call. Once the lead is received, it can be assigned to a sales person for a follow up call.

If all goes well, here is what our B2B sales process will look like:

1. Receive Lead

2. Assign Lead to Lead Development Rep

3. Follow-up

4. Pass Lead to Account Executive if Lead is a Prospect

5. Uncover requirements, obstacles, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities

6. Create and send a quote

7. Negotiate

8. Get quote approved and signed to win the deal

9. Pass approved quote to Accounts Receivable to create and send invoice

10. Collect payment

While this is a great start, there is more work to do. Let's go back to Step 1. When we receive a lead, where and how do we receive it? We need to write this down so we can further define the first step in our process.

For this example, let's assume we are not using a CRM.

• Form leads: All leads we collect through a form, including our "Contact Us" form and the 6 different forms we have for various digital campaigns, are stored in our Form software. At the end of each day, the marketing team manually exports the leads into a spreadsheet and passes them to the sales manager, who then passes this to our Lead Development Rep (LDR) so they have calls to make for the next day.

• Inbound emails and calls: All inbound emails and calls are routed to the Lead Development Rep so they can ask questions and collect the necessary data to see if there is a chance we can sell to them

• Trade show and event leads: The marketing team manually transcribes business card information into a spreadsheet. The marketing team also formats the lead lists we get from event organizers for the sales team in a spreadsheet. These spreadsheets are and passed to the sales manager, who then passes them to the LDR so they can make their follow up calls.

Now that we have defined the process of how we receive the leads, we can move on to defining our next steps. Rather than write out an entire example, we will limit ourselves to questions we would want to answer for the remaining steps.

1. Receive Lead

2. Assign Lead to LDR

   1. How does the manager assign leads? Are leads divided equally among reps? Are they divided by geography or some other criteria?

3. Follow-up

   1. How soon does the LDR follow up?

   2. Does the LDR follow up by phone, email, or both?

   3. Does the LDR send any information to the lead, like a brochure?

   4. What questions does the LDR need to ask?

   5. Where des the LDR record what they learn?

   6. How many follow-ups does the LDR do before they stop trying to reach the lead?

4. Pass Lead to Account Executive if Lead is a Prospect

   1. What determines whether a lead can be considered a prospect? What information do we need?

   2. How does the LDR execute the hand-off to the Account Executive?

5. Uncover requirements, obstacles, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities

   1. What questions does the Account Executive ask?

   2. Where do they record what they learn?

6. Create and send a quote

   1. How does the Account Executive create the quote?

   2. How is the quote sent?

7. Negotiate

   1. How do negotiations happen?

   2. How does the Account Executive ask the Sales Manager for discount approvals?

8. Get quote approved and signed to win the deal

   1. How does the quote get approved

   2. How does it get signed

9. Account executive hands off to the bookkeeper, who turns the approved quote into an invoice

   1. How does the hand-off happen?

   2. How does the invoice get created?

   3. How does the bookkeeper send the quote?

10. Collect payment

    1. How is payment collected?

    2. Who collects it?

    3. What forms of payment are accepted?

    4. Is payment collected all at once or are there partial or recurring payments?

    5. Are reminders sent to collect payment?

Now that we have broken down our process into a series of steps and posed questions that help us think through the process, we have effectively mapped out our sales process. With this detailed understanding of our process, we are now in a great position to be able to model it in a piece of software.

Conclusion

This guide has attempted to show the value of thinking through key business processes. We have used the sales process as an example. By trying to identify the goals, scope, and steps of a process, we are able to understand how we want to work so we can hit our business goals. Ultimatey, we have seen that mapping out a sales process beings with thinking through a few key questions relating to the What, Why, When, Who, and How:

• What: Naming a specific activity or process that we want to address

• Why: Defining a clear goal or outcome for the process we have named

• When: Defining the start and end points of the process; the trigger point and completion

• Who: Listing who's involved and what their role is in the process

• How: Breaking the process into small steps that include what tools or resources people will need to complete each step