Why you cannot sell without a sales process

Several organizations go on a sales overdrive, almost immediately. Many don’t even have their offerings in place, yet feel that this will evolve over time. They invest in an expensive sales force that keeps promising them great business, yet almost always fails to deliver. What seems to be the problem and how do you fix it.

Sales guys are born smart (that’s why they are your prime customer facing people, right?). Without a framework to tame sales guys, organizations tend to fall in their trap. If you hire a junior sales guy, then you need to spend all the bandwidth in training and grooming him into the job. If you hire a senior sales person, you run the risk of losing out on cash pretty fast, as costs are prohibitive.

It is important to set expectations from day one and also important to enable the sales team with all the common objections that they are likely to face in the market. I call this as a sales process definition and objection handling framework. What this simply means is that you convert the otherwise qualitative sales reporting into a robust quantitative framework. This ensures that all the members of the management & the board can get a bird’s eye view into sales pipeline, without the view being distorted by qualitative parameters.

How do you get a sales process and an objection handling framework done. Well it is quite simple. Get the people that matter together. Run a detailed workshop listing all the logical steps and expected outcomes. Also list down all the common objections that you have faced from customers and prospects and come up with a standard sales response to these objections. At Xenia, we have facilitated several companies to come out with their sales process and objection handling framework.

Your views

Best,

Atul Dhakappa

Twitter – @xeniaconsulting | Web- www.xenia-consulting.com

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