Process Development – The Sales Process

How do I raise my game by improving the sales process?

I started my career as a technician.  I was a lab technician and then a product engineer.  My role as a product engineer, beyond developing and evaluating new products, was to fix problems with the manufacturing process, or dream up ways to improve the process to make a better product or increase efficiency.  Once I ventured into the world of selling, I needed to gain some basic skills on which to build.  In my early years, I was fortunate to go through some very good sales training.  I went through the old Xerox selling courses: Situational Selling, Account Development Strategy, and Negotiating.  So how do we develop those basic skills into a knock-out approach?

Fortunately, I was able to apply my process development background to the sales process.  If selling is a process, and it certainly is, then it has steps that must occur on the way from first contact to close.  So applying a process development approach to your selling process makes perfect sense.  If you’ve never done process development, you may not know where to start.  It’s simpler than you think.

If you break down the process, there will be different activities or actions that make up the process.  Evaluate which actions have the greatest influence on the result.  Which steps need to be done really well to affect a positive outcome?  Pick the steps that are most important and leave the more trivial behind.  Then, evaluate which of those steps you are really good at and which ones are your bigger challenges.

Choose the steps in the process that are both most important and the most challenging for you.  Now you have steps and actions that are good targets for development.    We all have a tendency to work on the things that are easiest, but those are frequently the aspects of the process that contribute the least.  By this kind of evaluation, we guarantee that we will get the biggest bang for the buck from any improvements we make.

So what now?  Choose one step or activity and research how the most successful people handle it.  Find books, articles or network with colleagues and friends that demonstrate mastery in that particular area.  Develop a plan to improve your own performance from what you learn and begin to implement you plan immediately.  Your plan should include ways to measure your success.  You may want to develop several strategies and see what works best for you.  By isolating one aspect of your selling process, you can be assured that the results, be they favorable or not, are the result of how you have developed that part of the process.

From your earlier evaluation, you should have developed a list of steps with the most important and challenging on top.  Once you have improved one aspect, move on to the next.

By the way, this kind of process development is never-ending.  Just because you improve a particular step once, doesn’t mean you will never return to it.  Your selling process involves people.  Human behaviors change over time.  So too, must your process if you want to stay on your “A” game.

By David Phillips
Connect to me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidlphillips