How to Design a Sales Process Guidebook (Nonmembers)
Is Your Sales Process as Good as it Needs to Be?
• Grabs your prospect’s attention
• Separates the wheat from the chaff
• Convinces people of your value
• Gets them to act now
How well does your current sales process stack up?
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New Executive Guidebook: "How to Design a Sales Process for Customer Value and Continuous Improvement"
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You may have some great salespeople in your company. Yet, how well does your company really understand “the sales process?”
Chances are, “sales process” is a frustrating subject that has not produced the results people have hoped for. Often, managers and executives suffer from misconceptions, such as:
- The sales process is about what salespeople do, isn’t it?
- Our sales trainers gave us our sales process
- Our sales process is in our CRM system
- Our sales process is we get leads, and divvy them up.
- Who cares about “process?” If they don’t sell, we don’t pay them.
In most companies, even ones that have given their sales process a lot of effort, the sales process is really just lip service. The truth is, no one is going to turn away an order no matter how the salesperson got the business.
You can’t blame people for this perspective.
They just haven’t figured out how a process approach makes selling easier (rather than harder). Unfortunately, the result is a broken sales process, and a broken sales and marketing organization.
For example, consider which of these statements might be true of your sales and marketing organization:
- Our prospects aren’t buying, and we don’t know why.
- Our prospects ARE buying, and we don’t know why.
- The customer’s experience depends on who they are dealing with.
- Our CRM system has added cost and complexity, not results.
- Ramp-up time for new salespeople is more than six months.
- No common definitions exist for terms like “lead,” or “qualified opportunity.”
Even if only a few of those statements are true for your organization, you can be sure that your sales and marketing is costing you far more than it should, and is much less effective than it could be.
My name is Michael Webb, and I’m the author of “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way” (Kaplan, 2006). My team and I have helped dozens of companies such as MAQUET, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Marriott, WaterFurnace, DuPont, Xerox, and many smaller companies to identify bottlenecks, increase close ratios, improve forecast accuracy, and make the sales funnel flow faster.
When my article, “How to Avoid the Four Most Common Mistakes of Sales Process Mapping,” was published in 2003 (you’ll find it in the Articles section of this website), I began receiving emails from people all over the world saying how much it helped them.
Now, senior executive Robert Ferguson and I have assembled the essentials of what we have learned about how to engage sales and marketing teams to design and implement better sales and marketing processes and generate substantial, measurable, sustainable improvements in 90 days or less. What we’ve learned has gone far beyond anything I’ve written before.
Why are we doing this? For one simple reason: most people in the business world are unfortunately ignorant of how to apply the quality and productivity sciences to sales and marketing. They don’t realize the damage they are doing to their businesses, or how much better off they would be if they knew how to apply a more scientific approach.
In our view, this kind of information ought to be available readily, just as APICS and ASQ provide education for professionals in manufacturing industries. Our firm would be much better off if this material weren’t confidential and proprietary, but were common knowledge and lots of people were doing it.
So, we’ve documented our discoveries in this new guidebook and are making the information available publicly for prices reasonably commensurate to the value they contain.
“How to Design a Sales Process
for Customer Value and Continuous Improvement”
If you are a senior executive, a sales and/or marketing manager, or a process improvement leader, this guidebook shows you how to lead your team on a scientific journey through the complex and subtle world of their sales and marketing process.
- How to galvanize salespeople (not to mention marketers) around goals everyone can agree on
- How to uncover the facts and data you need to design the sales process correctly
- What myths, misperceptions, and fears your participants are likely to have, and how to deal with them
- How to identify the customer’s needs and preferences you must satisfy if you are to sell to them effectively
- How to ensure that the new process actually makes selling easier rather than harder
- How to ensure the team actually uses the new process, and that results are sustained for the long term
- How to devise a blueprint for getting departments to work together
- How to incorporate sales production metrics that energize the team (and actually keep the CEO out of your office!)
This guidebook assembles years of sales and marketing savvy and leadership effectiveness, in one unique package. It shows you how to burn through the resistance to change that is inherent in most marketing and sales organizations. It lays out a path that will make a huge difference for you and your team. You will receive:
- Guidelines for what you can, and cannot, change in a process design/mapping effort
- How to conduct the research necessary to conduct a successful initiative
- Linkages between sales and marketing best practices and lean, value-stream-mapping, and six sigma principles
- Ways to avoid the fundamental mistakes that kill most process mapping and sales process design efforts before they get started
- Examples of real business results you can and should expect from your initiative
- A project plan for making your process mapping effort a success
- Scripted presentation slides for orienting your team and leading them through the workshop successfully
- Illustrations of what can go wrong and what to do about it during your process mapping session
- Guidelines for coaching your team in developing a strong sales process
- Example process maps from five different industries with descriptions and war stories
The result of these sessions is powerful: participants build a consensus on what is important, and how to accomplish it in their environment. These become the top-level business requirements for your systems and your training.
Several of our clients, armed with the maps we helped them create, went on to be told by their CRM suppliers and sales trainers that theirs was the most successful initiative their company ever had.
Here’s what people have said (most want to remain confidential, for obvious reasons):
- “Your idea about the sales process creating value for the customer is one of the most valuable things I have encountered. Our people think about selling in an entirely different way now.”
Managing Partner, CRM Systems Integrator - “Now that we see how the consumer and the dealer sales processes work together, it is a lot easier for our people to understand what needs to be done.”
CEO, Small Manufacturing Company - “The process map we developed helped us communicate more effectively with the product marketing divisions. Now, everyone knows whose job it is to make sales easier.”
V.P. Sales, Fortune 1000 Company
The guidebook contains more than 100 pages of tactical how-to instructions and examples for applying these powerful principles in your environment. It also contains free access to MS Word and PowerPoint template files to get you started fast!
Here’s What You Get
The “How to Design a Sales Process” Guidebook provides everything you need to conduct process mapping sessions with your staff, colleagues, or clients. This manual provides:
- Background on process mapping and sales and marketing practices
- Insight for why sales and marketing people behave the way they do and what you must do to be effective
- Translations between traditional sales and marketing and the new, scientific approach
- Linkages between many popular sales training methodologies and the new model
- Linkages to technical process terminology from lean, six sigma, and TQM
- Homework and preparation you must do to ensure your initiative is successful and the team “gets it”
- How to gauge the level of granularity appropriately for your team
- A framework enabling everyone to understand what is value add, and what is not
- How to get the team to understand and agree on common-sense metrics
- How to set realistic expectations from your initiative, and make them stick
- How to establish a continuous improvement commitment (based on PDCA) moving forward
- Examples of sales process maps from several different industries and market channels and how to develop them
- Reference library of tools, templates, helpful software
With the sales process mapping guidebook, you’ll have a procedure to follow for almost any situation. You’ll learn the key questions to get them thinking in the right direction. You’ll learn how to capture your people’s best intentions, and get everyone pulling in the right direction. You’ll have salespeople and marketers (and customers) thanking you for helping them so effectively.
You’ll also receive free access to MS Word and PowerPoint template files to get you started fast! Then, depending on the options you choose, within a week you can receive that same material in hard copy, packaged in a three-ring binder. You’ll have over 90 pages of tactical how-to instructions and examples for applying process mapping in your sales environment.
NO RISK Thanks to This Guarantee
Every guidebook comes with a full 100% money-back guarantee for 90 days. If you are not completely satisfied for any reason–or no reason at all–simply return the book and you will promptly receive a full refund. No hassles, no hard feelings.
Something you might like to know:
It is common for people selling information products to have a 10% return rate for their products. In fact, some marketers believe that if your return rate isn’t close to that, you aren’t selling hard enough.
Well, you might like to know that in the five years since these guidebooks have been on the market, hundreds have been purchased, yet I have processed only one refund.
I know what I’m talking about, and these guidebooks contain valuable information that will help your organization. (The coming new editions will be even better!)
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