Sales is an art, and salesmen are considered to be artists. A wise man once said a good salesman could sell hair oil to a bald man. Sales is an art as it requires one to have a skill set not everyone can possess easily. The vision of a salesman is unique, just like one of an artist who sees the world around him with an eye for creativity and innovation. An artist is what his canvas portrays; a salesman is what his words stand for.
What is a sales cycle?
A Sales cycle can be defined as individual stages from acquiring a lead to selling your product successfully in exchange for money. The 6 steps in a sales cycle are Lead capturing, Prospecting, Connecting with a prospect, Presenting your product and explaining its uses, features, benefits, price, and competitive advantage, negotiating the price, and in the end, Closing the sale.
6 Steps in a Sales Process
Lead capturing
Lead capturing is the first step in any sales cycle. You can use cold calling to capture new leads or run paid campaigns on and offline to connect with new prospects, or you can always visit trade shows from time to time to increase the reach and RoHS of your product.
Leads can be seamlessly captured with the help of lead capture forms, chatbots, exit pop-us, and email campaigns, to name a few effective Lead capturing methods. Methods such as lead forms can effectively capture a lead for event managers, financial planners, and small business owners—email capturing tools like Optinmonster, WP forms, and Bloom. You can also use CRM software to help foolproof Lead capturing processes.
Prospecting
Prospecting is the process of identifying a targeted group of audience who would benefit from using your product or service. Every product has a target audience, which contributes to the highest sales.
The journey of a prospect becoming a customer is a very tricky ride, as over-selling your product can lead to your prospect feeling uncomfortable or forced into buying your product. The golden rule a salesperson should always follow before meeting a prospect is to try as hard as possible to fulfill a need and not simply sell a product.
Connecting
In this next step in a sales cycle, you would need to collect all the information you can about a prospect’s requirements. Once your list is ready, you can now connect with the prospect via email, call, social media, or even in-person to share details about your product or services and give more information if they are interested.
Offering
The earlier step would help you understand the business requirements of your prospect. You can, after that, build a presentation showcasing all the details one should know about your product or service. The point to remember here is that the representation should be made to meet your prospect’s business needs.
Negotiating
There is no correct number here, and even the best offers given by you and your team will at times be higher than what the prospect is willing to settle for. At this point, you and the team need to hold your horses and understand the price range the prospect is looking to settle for, thereby pushing the deal one step closer to a sale.
Closing the sale
You have now reached the end of the sales process; all you need to do at this stage is to create a proposal and send it across to your prospect and new customer. Once all the paperwork is signed, and the product is delivered to the customer, the customer takes one look at the product and goes ahead with the payment process. The sale at this point is complete, and you have reached the end of the sales process.
Importance of a Sales Process
A Sales process helps you capture quality leads with ease and helps in laying out a clear course ahead in every step towards closing a sale. This process eliminates any possible inefficiencies, as this enables a salesman to understand every business need of a prospect.
According to research done by the Sales Management Association, 90% of companies who follow a sales process are known to meet their sales targets regularly. In simple words, it is more like a roadmap that helps you in finding your way ahead if and when you have issues in closing a sale. Also, a sales process helps review the performance of a team and bring up any required areas of improvement.
How to create an effective sales process that can help improve sales
A salesman should consider before creating a sales process to understand every given aspect of their product. A good sales process can even help salesmen sell hair oil to a bald man. As mentioned before, a sales process ideally in any given industry would work the same way.
Whether they are a salesman making an effort to sell technological appliances to a prospect or they are looking to sell a bunch of postcards. The process, in any case, should start with a salesman doing all it takes to capture leads or prospects interested in purchasing his product or service. The second step in a sales process is prospecting; this process will help a salesman understand the target audience of their product or service.
As a continuation to the earlier step, a salesman should make an effort to connect with new prospects and build a relationship with existing options via mail, emails, social media, call, or in person. The next step is Offering; in his first interaction with his prospect, a salesman should be able to gather as much information as they can about the business needs of a prospect.
The next step is a negotiation; as said earlier, any price given to a prospect without understanding his budget in delaying the processor in some cases even results in discontinuation of the sale being made to a prospect. Hence it is essential for a salesman to truly understand every business requirement of the prospect and do whatever it takes to convenience the prospect to move ahead towards closing the sale.
As said earlier, sales is indeed an art and it could take you ages to become the best salesman in the world. However a professional course can help you understand the basics of how to build an effective sales process. Once you learn the same, you will then be able to easily reach your sales goals on a regular basis.
0 Source: GreatLearning Blog
