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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Close sales faster. Simply put, stop wasting time once you’ve completed all the steps necessary to move an opportunity forward.

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.