10 Easy Ways to Maximize Sales Process Effectiveness

Professional services and technology—two things VAR businesses intimately understand—are all about processes. Whether it’s project processes, help desk processes, implementation processes or maintenance processes, each of those operations ensures the business runs smoothly and customers extract the most value from your company’s offerings.

Then there’s the sales process.

Unfortunately, this process typically isn’t given the attention it deserves. Sure, most VARs have spent some time outlining a sales process, or they rely on one acquired through a training session, consultancy or CRM system. But all too often, these sales processes aren’t implemented as effectively as the other operational processes listed above, and that can lead to underwhelming bottom-line results.

It’s time to change that. Here are 10 easy ways that your VAR business can more effectively use the sales process to positively alter your company’s trajectory:

1. Train new hires the right way from the beginning. You’ll shorten their time to full productivity and ensure they fully adopt your sales process.
2. Hold your sales staff accountable to your process. Once everyone understands how to use your sales process, make sure they feel beholden to it. You’ll see fewer mistakes and improved closing ratios.
3. Test the sales process and update with successful best practices. If one of your reps is doing something that consistently drives results, incorporate it into your sales process. This will help you gain staff buy-in and enhance sales performance.
4. Align forecasting with the sales process to quickly monitor consistent distribution of your opportunity pipeline. This will reduce the peaks and valleys that often plague cash flow.
5. Identify where sales reps get stuck in the process and help them get past those barriers. Proactive coaching is critical. It helps you fix problems before you (and your reps) get frustrated with poor performance, and more quickly recognize when it’s time to let someone go. Both outcomes will save you valuable time and money.
6. Check that each step of the sales process has been followed during opportunity reviews. If they haven’t, send reps back to complete missed steps. You’ll see your win rate increase as a result.
7. Monitor the time it takes opportunities to move through the sales process and identify logjams. If you see specific stages where opportunities linger, you can refine your sales process to increase conversion and decrease the overall time to close.
8. Create a consistent sales vocabulary. This helps everyone understand common sales process vernacular and makes it easier to identify their role in supporting the various stages of the sales process. This improves productivity and team morale, and decreases customer response times.
9. Close sales faster. Simply put, stop wasting time once you’ve completed all the steps necessary to move an opportunity forward.
10. Input your sales process into your CRM and create easily referenceable task lists for each phase. By doing this, every staff member will gain clarity into the steps that need to be taken at each stage of the sales process, and productivity will naturally increase.

Ultimately, improving sales process buy-in, adoption and execution can completely change the pace of your business, accelerating the time it takes to convert leads to opportunities and opportunities to new customers. If you need some help getting started with this process, call me and I’ll gladly share some suggestions!

Kendra Lee is a top IT seller, prospect attraction expert, author of the award winning books “The Sales Magnet” and “Selling Against the Goal” and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment.