-Steps in the selling process

-Changes in selling due to technology

[SLIDE 1]

The selling process is the set of steps an organization goes through to sell a product or service. Selling is not limited to a single individual; teams are used. People in marketing, sales, and other organizations support the full process.

There are seven basic steps in the sales process:

1.-Generate leads
2.-Qualify leads
3.-Approach the customer and probe needs
4.-Develop and propose solutions
5.-Handle objections
6.-Close the sale
7.-Follow up

[SLIDE 2]

Generating leads, or lead prospecting, is the process that identifies firms and individuals most likely to buy the seller’s product. Social media, trade shows, events, advertising and all the other promotional channels and methods can help develop leads.

One of the basic lead generation tools is cold calling, where a salesperson reaches out to a prospect without any prior interest shown by the individual or organization. The massive increase in email spam and auto-dialers with phones have made cold calling, except in person, a shrinking tool as fewer people will consider responding to a cold call.

There is an old expression that word of mouth is the most expensive and most valuable advertising source. Referrals are recommendations to a salesperson made by a customer or business associate. These leads should be prioritized, since they usually have been qualified by the referring person, often have higher initial purchases, and can have shorter sales cycles than other first-time sales.

Networking is using friends, business contacts, coworkers, acquaintances, and fellow members in professional and civic organizations to find potential clients. LinkedIn is the primary social media platform for business and is one source used by many professionals for networking.

[SLIDE 3]

Sometimes marketing makes the mistake of thinking the number of leads handed to sales is a key performance indicator. That’s not the case. In a number of industries, sales will only follow up on 10-15 percent of leads. What is needed is to understand the quality of each lead. 

The determination of a prospect’s quality relies on four key factors:

-Need: Does the prospect recognize a need for the product the firm is offering? Early questioning by a telemarketing organization can help understand if the prospect feels the need or if more information can create that need.

-Buying power: Regardless of how interested a prospect is in a good or service, there needs to be the buying power to purchase the product. It is critical to find out who in an organization has the buying power.

-Receptivity & availability: If the lead is not interested in meeting with the sales team, the sale cannot proceed.

-Urgency: Does the prospect have a short-term need for the product or is the person still investigating a long-term need? The answer addresses how the sales team prioritizes communications with the prospect compared to the other qualified leads.

[SLIDE 4]
Once a qualified lead is handed to sales, that is not the time to immediately contact the prospect. Step three in the sales process includes preparation.

The preapproach is the work that must be done by a salespersons before the prospect is contacted. This includes basic research such as visiting a company’s web site, checking Moody’s, Dunn & Bradstreet, or other financial records sites, and even checking blogs and social media feeds. Note that preapproach is key for B2B sales and outside consumer sales but is not possible in a retail environment where customers enter the store without warning.

The goal of the approach and initial contact is to begin a needs assessment, a determination of the customer’s specific needs and wants and the range of options the customer has for satisfying them. The needs assessment has four main areas in which the salesperson must be familiar:

-Product: Product knowledge is the cornerstone for conducting a successful needs analysis.

-Customer and customer needs: The salesperson/team should try to know more about the customer needs than the customer does, helping to identify and address those needs.

-Competition: Competitive intelligence is necessary to address customer questions and challenges as they evaluate multiple solutions.

-Industry: In B2B sales, it is critical to understand the prospect’s industry, its challenges and its economic and financial condition.

Just as with marketing campaigns, the goal of the approach is to get the prospect to agree to further action. The salesperson should end the approach by summarizing customer needs and providing a call to action that will drive further discussion or sale. Without a commitment to further action by the prospect, the sale cannot move forward.

[SLIDE 5]

Once the salesperson has acquired the information to determine how the company’s goods or service addresses the prospect’s needs, a solution must be proposed.

The sales proposal is a formal written document or professional presentation that outlines how the salesperson’s product or service will meet or exceed the prospect’s needs. While that formality is not required in retail sales, a salesperson in that environment must still be clear as to why what is being offered is appropriate for the prospect.

The sales presentation is the formal meeting where a salesperson presents a sales proposal to a prospective buyer. Two things should be noted in B2B presentations. First, the presentation usually includes more than one person, from multiple departments -- so the sales team must be prepared to address the multiple interests of the stakeholders. Second, more and more, those proposals are happening through teleconferencing rather than in person. Sales must pay careful attention as many visual and verbal cues will either be missing or harder to observe.

[SLIDE 6]

It is extremely rare that a customer is ready to write a check immediately after a sales presentation. There will be questions and the sales team must be able to address those questions.

The needs assessment matters at this stage, especially the parts about competition. Only by understanding the questions the competition has seeded can sales appropriately handle objections.

One key acronym in sales is FUD, which stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. During the sales presentation, the sales team should be putting forward the strengths of their own product. At the same time, they should be mentioning challenges the customer faces in a way that presents not only how the company’s solution addresses the challenge but how competitive products cannot meet those needs (or at least, not as well).

At the same time, many of the objections that prospects will bring up are FUDs created about a company’s products by the competition’s sales team. That is why understanding the competition is so important. It will help when addressing these objections.

[SLIDE 7]

At some point in the sales process, it becomes time to close the sale. One of the hardest parts of the process is accepting that "no" will happen a lot and that rejection must be handled well. Building long- term relationships means looking past an individual sale. Especially in companies, a rejection in one department or division does not mean an automatic rejection everywhere.

Even when there is not a clear "no," there is not always a clear "yes." Negotiation is the process during which both the salesperson and the prospect offer special concessions in an attempt to arrive at a sales agreement. Often, the key negotiated item is price, and sales must be able to not only negotiate a price change but to have other ideas as options other than price, such as longer warranties. In addition, a concession on one side can open a concession from the other side. For instance, a price might be lowered for a longer-term contract.

[SLIDE 8]

In relationship management, closing a sale is not the end of the relationship. In the traditional approach, follow-up only extended to product delivery. Today, building a relationship means that sales works with customer support and other groups to keep track of how the customer is succeeding with the product. That builds communications that more easily allows additional sales further into an organization or with newer products.

In B2B sales, especially in large companies, there is a concept called "land and expand." There is rarely an opportunity to gain a full corporate contract in a mid-sized or large organization on the first sale. A successful sale into a department or division is an opportunity for the next sale in another segment of the company. Think back to Step 1, lead generation. Referrals are powerful, and relationship sales relies on those referrals to expand within a company.

[SLIDE 9]

The way sales has changed with technological advances can be summed up in one word: accessibility.

The Internet and mobile phones mean that the salesperson is more accessible to the prospect than ever before.  This sets expectations for response time, and sales must be able to meet those expectations. That does not mean all phone calls must be immediately answered. It does mean that sales tools such as catalogs, brochures, and customer case studies can more easily and quickly be sent to prospects to address questions. It means that order and service requests can be partially-automated. It means that sales can be more efficient in its work.

At the same time, technology is helping the transformation to relationship selling. Software that provides information about all recent contact points with a prospect or customer can help sales to better tune communications to address concerns and interests of the market. For instance, if customer service is dealing with a major problem at a customer site, it is probably not time for the salesperson to start a large upsell, but it might be time to call the customer and offer assistance.