In Sales, process is everything. By nature I am not a process-oriented guy, I am more of the fly by the seat of my pants gut-reaction type. However, not everyone works well like this (including me). I learned early in my sales career that processes, as much as I hate to admit it, are vital. They work as a road map to help us get to where we need to go. Having a process gives us the ability to look for areas of improvement and fix them. Sounds obvious, right? Not always.

The first key is to remember that in sales your process is dynamic and not scripted. For example, let’s look at golfing. You will swing the same way every time and get better and better at that swing. However, as you golf you will encounter different variables along the way. You wouldn’t use a putter for a long drive would you? No, and you wouldn’t grab your nine iron and whack away either, you would carefully select the correct club and then just like you practiced execute the perfect swing. You need to be willing to redefine the process as you move along. You need to learn to continuously develop your process along the way.

The first step to developing your process is to sit down and break your big process into steps and then break those steps into smaller steps.

A telemarketing process for technology education it would look something like this:

Rapport: To lay ground work for harder questions later.

Admissibility: Is this person illegible to go to school with us? (Why waste time?)

Motivation: Why does this person need this product?

Payment: How are they planning on paying for school? (Ignore this and people who are not sure are likely to no-show) Payment is NOT price.

Start Date: Build a sense of urgency and suggest next possible start date.

Set appointment That’s what we are calling for right?

Referral: Who would they like to have in class with them?

The process of doing this is the same in any industry, and could just as easily be done face to face with slight modification…  90% of the sales training with my team is how to navigate this system.

The advantage as a manager to this is it makes it much easier to coach because I can easily see where the issues are in your efforts, and we can train and role play around specific parts of the call instead of saying “I need to work on my telemarketing skills”. Moreover, they make it easy to track and measure metrics and identify trends and opportunities for improvement. If you are just out “winging it”, it is very hard to identify potential issues because no two calls are ever the same.

So even though I am not a process guy by nature, I still recognize that processes are vital to any sales organization. They help us to stay focused and on track, and they help us improve.

To implement:

Do you have a set process you take clients through or do you just go with the flow?

What are the steps involved in moving someone from prospect to client in your organization?

Can any of those steps be broken down into smaller steps?

Are there metrics you can watch to make sure your process is efficient?

If you have a process when was the last time you reviewed it? Is it getting stale?

I understand that sales people would rather be selling than prospecting, sad that some even see these as different things as opposed to part of the same process; but if your customers don’t come to you like they do at Burger King, you need to prospect.

The raw material for creating prospects is leads, the way to convert leads to prospect is follow through. In these days of genteel euphemisms, our marketing friends have coined the expression “lead nurturing”, which is exactly correct.

Depending who you read, it could take a minimum of six touch points to gain the attention of a lead enough to engage them in a conversation that will determine if they are in fact a potential prospect. Depending on the number of prospects you need to hit your number, that’s a lot of follow up, that’s a lot of planning, that means you’ll need a process.

We recommend and use a process we call T – C – E:

Touch – Everyone we meet (contextually), is added to our monthly newsletter data base, The Pipeline, they have the opportunity to safely unsubscribe, but we also make an effort to have interesting articles relevant to all involved in B2B sales.  This way at least once a month, and at times with special announcements each of these leads sees us, our name our logo at least 15 to 16 times a year.

Thanks to the tools built in to e-mail marketing tools this also give us great visibility into what diffe3rent people are reading, what is of interest, what is not.  Specifically to follow up, we reach out if someone demonstrates strong interest in a specific article.  A few years back, I saw that a lead, one who I met with six months prior, and had called about 60 days before the article appeared, seemed very interested in an article on cold calling.  How do we define interested, he accessed the article 18 in three days; I followed up with a call, “Tom how you doing?” I asked; he said “you know Tibor, I was just thinking about you.”  No kidding I thought.  We met, we did the program, and we are still meeting on an ongoing basis.

Contact – With each lead we devise a plan to contact them directly over and above the regular e-mail campaign cycle.  These are usually calls, but at times direct e-mails, special invitations to events directed at them specifically as opposed to broad based generic mailings.  This dictates that you do rank your leads, we use a simple 1 – 2 – 3 ranking, with one getting the greatest focus, 2 next, etc.  It is important that you have clear definitions for each of the rankings, and depending on your business, you could have prospect that rank as 1 for one service, and maybe rank as a 3 for another product.  The clear definitions will allow you to move leads up and down the rank scale and make sure that your best shots are always visible.

Since we sell to sales organizations, our 1 ranked leads get a direct call – Contact – every three months, since most sales organization seem to live their lives quarterly, (some these days monthly).  When we contact with them we have a specific objective, getting a face to face meeting; so we know what is a good outcome from the follow up, and what is not.  If we do get the appointment, and it leads to a conversation they get moved to the Engage category, and enter our pipeline management process.  If they do not engage, we reassess their ranking, and place them back accordingly.  Or sometimes not, if their circumstances had changed to the point where they are no longer a viable lead, they get put back in to the general pool, and start the process from zero.

Engage – Engage is the most straight forward of the three, if the appointment is good (we have a mutually agreed on next step), they, as stated above, they move into the next phase of the process, the pipeline.  If they do not progress through to a transaction, they are either removed from the lead pool for specific reasons; they are put into the general pool for re-engagement at some point in the future, or placed back into the Contact phase.  They always, with rare exception or if they have been removes from the lead pool, continue to get touched and receive our newsletter and related monitoring.

While this may seem laborious, it is not, you can systemize and automate most of it except the monitoring, which allow us to be aware of trends and other things that benefit us in other ways.  But a thorough follow through regime at the point above the pipe gives us and those clients that adopt is a great jump on sales, accelerating the velocity of the sales and shortening their sales cycles, not to mention a great deal of insight that pays other dividends.

The scenario usually unfolds when sitting with a VP or Director of sales, whether it is a formal sales call or just a discussion at an event; it happens more often where the organization is challenged in meeting, rather than exceeding objectives.  There comes a point when the other party in the conversation says something like:

“Well Tibor, the thing you have to understand is that our people know this industry, they are very experienced, most of them have 15 or years under their belts, and even when we hire, we only hire from the industry, you know, people who bring the same type of experience to the job and can hit the ground running.”

My response usually is something along the lines of:

“Well George, I certainly appreciate that, in fact many people do tell me the same.  I just curious if you don’t mind me asking, your average rep, say with 13 years, would you say that they have had 13 years of continuous growth and development, or the same year 13 times over?”

Then I just sit back.

Some people don’t get it, but the ones that do, we are able to move to the real issues quite quickly.  One of the recurring themes is what most would call sales burn out.  In general, a lot of sales professional do not maintain the consistency and pace they initially demonstrated when stepping into the role.  They either become victims of their own success or never fully realize success and slowly accept their fate and settle into acceptance of less than their full potential.

I argue that at either end of this spectrum, the root cause is the same: a lack of training and basic skill development, but to a much greater degree a lack of planning that prevents even those who may possess the skills to fully execute.  As a result, many end up completing task but rarely achieving objectives and results.

Let me say right here that the reason I started this piece by talking about my discussions with senior sales leaders or management, is that I believe that they are to a great degree responsible for this, and at the same time have the ability to reverse it should they choose (sadly they often don’t).

I say this because they are there when the young sales professional shows up malleable, pliable and full of energy, open to being shaped and focused.  This is the time that the basics of planning, time allocation and process should be stressed, but instead they are given minimal training, usually mostly around product not selling, and then sent out to conquer.

The young reps run fast and run hard, and quickly begin to gravitate into one of the two groups cited above.  In fact there are three groups, using the old 80/20 rule, it breaks down as follows: 20% get the need for planning, managing activity based on required time and metrics; they focus on executing the sales process.  These people are often held out as the anomalies, “it’d be great if everyone could sell like Charlie, but he is different.”  No new kid wants to be different.  The manager and the rep should be working to these differences, but they are usually distracted and over whelmed by the 80%.

The other 80%, the burn out group, fall into to the two groups, half flaming out under the weight of their success.  They run get prospects, write proposals, win clients, busy busy busy.  They spend less and less time selling and more time managing the base.  It’s good for a while but they get out of shape (not having run in some time), they never did have the form right, and as the base erodes and the competition (internal and external) grows, they realize they have to do something to change the tide.  It is then that they face a hard choice, do they learn the basics and practice them, some do; or do they put their old track suit on and try running hard again.  Out of shape out of practice: the burn out.

The other half of the 80% never really took off.  They worked the base they adopted as part of their territory, seeing “lower hanging fruit” as the big time.  They ran in to some new opportunities much like a blind squirrel runs into a nut sometimes.  But they hardly take off, usually just enough to gently crash; it takes slightly less effort to keep them than to replace them (I hope some people take issue with that statement, but this is what I hear managers say everyday); much like a log on a fire, they are just there, giving less light and less heat, eventually replaced by a new log, new rep.

The sad reality is sales burn out is unique among professions. In sports they would get traded.  In law, or aviation they would have to keep up or be replaced.  It is funny how sales is one of the only professions where one can make lots of money, have impact on the success of others and their own company,  but is not required to continuously educate and upgrade ones self.  If we did have to, we would be able to avoid sales burn out, both at the front line level and management level.