Sales Process Can Help You Become a Sales Virtuoso

Danita Bye

Great salespeople are creative geniuses. They’re the Chick Coreas and Joe Satrianis of the sales world. They’re the ones who dance around, through, over, and under each obstacle; selling those who naysayers say can’t be sold and making it look effortless along the way. Somehow, they’ve raised above all that, and when they get on the phone or show up in a prospect’s office, they make beautiful music without even breaking a sweat.

Once upon a time, though, they sweated plenty – and despite appearances, they still do.
If you’ve ever listened to a jazz pianist or a rock and roll guitar player shredding away on their instrument, firing a fusillade of notes into the air or squeezing a life story from a single held tone, you know how breathtaking it can be and how effortless it can look. But no matter how original the music, all musicians work within the same eight-note scale pattern. No matter how creative they are, they’re still bound by that structure. In fact, those bounds are what make creative expression possible in the first place – and structure is what makes chart-topping sales performance possible. Without structure, you’re just making noise, whether you’re a musician or a salesperson.

Pianists and guitarists have their eight-note structural playground, but what about salespeople? What’s the box that’s going to allow them to think outside the box and make more and better sales? The musical scale here is a criteria-based sales process, a sales methodology that breaks up the sales process into specific units and defines conditions that must be met in order to continue to the next phase of the process.

Sales Process In broad strokes might look something like this:

1. Suspect Phase: Identify who may need your product or services. Learn about the company, key players, problems that may exist, introduce your positioning statement and make an appointment.

2. Prospect Phase: Define the need and why they need it. Identify compelling reasons and benefits that you offer solutions to. Develop a professional relationship that allows you to demonstrate expertise. Differentiate your solution and clearly quantify the cost of the problem.

3. Qualified Phase: Agree on a purchasing process required to purchase including who will need to be involved in the decision and the availability of a budget. Define the timeline, criteria and decision-making process. Find out if there is any competition or issues that may affect the decision.

4. Solution Phase: Summarize your value proposition, benefits and cost justification. Offer examples, references and case studies. Give a quote for your solution.

5. Paperwork Phase: At this stage any issues that were not uncovered will come up and will need to be resolved. The final term and details will be negotiated and added to the contract. This should be a low stress and positive experience for both parties.

Sales Process Management

Criteria based selling can have 4 to 8 steps in it depending on the needs of the company and the presenter but all have the same foundation. What is important is that you do not skip a phase, leave any detail unexplored or make assumptions that you are OK as it will lead to a more stressful and unsuccessful selling career.

On the surface, carefully following each step of the process might seem restrictive. But it’s this framework that allows for more creativity and better performance in the long run. Much like a musician’s eight-note scale, a criteria-based sales process allows salespeople to get off the beaten path and improvise, safe in the knowledge that they can always return to a tried-and-true structure if they get start to get a little lost. Rather than limiting them, a criteria-based sales process sets them free to explore, just like the musical scale allows Chick Corea and Joe Satriani to create the kind of wild and inventive music they’re revered for.
How about you? Do you maintain the disciplined, criteria-based sales processes that make true creativity – and stellar sales results – possible? Or are you just making noise?

For more insights on Sales Strategy and Sales Process, visit Sales Growth Specialists website.

Bio: Danita Bye

Nationally recognized sales management and leadership expert Danita Bye built her reputation on building and inspiring process-oriented, no excuse, high-performance sales teams that deliver bottom line results. With her unique Fortune-100-turned-entrepreneur perspective, Danita helps CEOs and company presidents take their businesses to the next level. Her practical, no-nonsense approach to sales management, combined with her leadership acumen, enables sales leadership to increase sales, creating predictable revenue streams.
As a 10-year veteran of the Xerox Corporation, Danita consistently achieved award winning sales performance before leaving to become an equity partner and national sales manager for a Minneapolis-based medical device company. In this capacity, she increased annual revenues from $300,000 to a run rate of $20 million in just ten years.
Danita has authored numerous articles on sales management and leadership. In addition, she was a featured as a sales development expert on the TV show, “The Ruthless Entrepreneur,” which is currently airing on the Oxygen Network. Leadership Shift, Management Acceleration and a library of eBooks on critical sales management issues are available on the Sales Growth Specialists’ website.

Danita can be reached at Danita@SalesGrowthSpecialists.com, 612-267-3320 or 800-256-2799.

For more insights on Sales Strategy and Sales Process, visit www.SalesGrowthSpecialists.com.