What is truth?” The question for the ages was immortalized by Pontius Pilate. Not as existential, but similarly confounding, it seems, is, “What is sales process?”
On a whim, I Googled the term, “sales process.” Wow! Everyone from Microsoft to Salesforce.com to Wikipedia weigh in. What they all seem to have in common is some form of step-by-step approach to selling that includes something like: prospect, identify needs, propose solutions, negotiate, close, repeat.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t work with that. Too traditional, too transactional, too – dare I say – trite.
As regular readers of these pages know, I live by the principle of “mindset before methodology.” I regularly exhort sales professionals to rethink the traditional sales mindset and the traditional sales language that it produces before even thinking about process or methodology. So for starters, any discussion of sales process that isn’t prefaced with a reference to sales mindset and sales language doesn’t carry much credibility with me.
But in a larger sense – and with all due respect to Mr. Gates – I believe this traditional approach to sales process yields the very thing it’s intended to avoid: long, costly, unpredictable sales cycles that are centered around product and price.
That said, there’s one aspect of Microsoft’s (et al) thinking on sales process that I do agree with, and that is that a sales process should be universal. I believe that for a sales process to be a sales process, it must apply equally to the largest, most complex opportunities and to the smallest, most “transaction-like” opportunities.
Here’s how I approach sales process. First, I frame it up in terms of questions to be answered, not steps to be taken (I believe “selling-by-steps” is “selling-by-numbers”). The five questions in Stapleton’s universal sales process are:
1. What is the value of the opportunity? In many ways, this question is about the opportunity’s potential value. It asks some obvious and not-so-obvious questions about the opportunity (or we sometimes like to say, “alleged opportunity”) such as: What is the short-term and long-term revenue potential? How profitable is it likely to be? If revenue and margin potential fall short, does it have any strategic marketing value that might warrant its pursuit anyhow? What, if any, unusual risks do we assume by pursuing or winning this business? What level of resources will be required to pursue this business?
2. How real and how hot is the “opportunity?” Salespeople are known more for optimism than objectivity. On balance, this might be a virtue. However, I believe that I once told the story in these pages of a client sales guy who’d spent 15 man-days developing an RFP response for an opportunity which, if he had just asked one very specific “urgency-to-buy” question he would have seen immediately that his best response would have been a 15-minute ballpark estimate. In the world of traditional selling there is usually a “qualifying step.” However, that step in the process usually takes the form of: Is there a need? Can we meet it? Are we likely to win? Assessing how real and hot an opportunity is requires gaining an understanding of: the specific business circumstances that are compelling the customer to make a change, the implications to the account’s business of making a change, the implications to the account’s business of not making a change, and the internal hurdles to making a change.
3. How winnable is it? One of the most important “discoveries” we’ve made at Stapleton is the importance of separating “how real and how hot” from “how winnable.” An opportunity’s winnability must be viewed through the same objective lenses as its “realness and hotness.” Assessing winnability requires assessing three things: What level of support do we have from powerful people (regular readers know that we never ask questions about “decision-makers”), how strong is the fit? (we break fit down to three parts, solution fit, business fit, and – believe it or not – “philosophical” fit), and how strong is our competitive position?
4. What should my next step be? When salespeople are honest with themselves, they will acknowledge that figuring out what to do next is usually the hardest part of selling. The first three questions tell us everything we need to know in order to figure out what to do next. More often than not, the next step in most sales campaigns is to learn more. Though sometimes that next step needs to be accessing an executive, or perhaps developing a business presentation.
5. How do I implement my next step? When we at Stapleton are honest with ourselves, we will acknowledge that the hardest thing for most salespeople is figuring out how to implement their next step. And this brings us back to mindset and language. We believe that only with the right sales mindset and sales language can salespeople succeed in executing the (right) sales process.
In summary, mindset precedes methodology (i.e. sales mindset must be addressed before sales process) and sales process should be thought of as questions to answer instead of steps to take in the sales campaign.
Jerry Stapleton is the founder of Stapleton Resources LLC, a Waukesha-based sales force effectiveness practice. He can be reached at (262) 524-8099.
