The Sales Process Myth

There are many definitions for a sales process and who cares!

Rather than focusing on the 'sales process', sales people need to be taught how to notice the customer's 'buying process'.

So forget about the sales process and start to notice the customer's buying process so that you can pitch what they need to hear.

This isn't about text book definitions! It's customer centric. It can't be described in a few steps, but it can be described with a set of principles and a foundation of skill.

You might have come across these silly steps before:

1. finding your lead

2. making sure that lead is qualified (has a phD or two!)

3. need identification

4. do your pitch

5. closing

6. transacting the deal

and I would urge you to forget about them because they don't address the customer! They address the process in a text book (and we don't sell to text books). I might also add that the reason this process has spread so much is because too many sales trainers don't ever sell a thing

To phrase it differently: if person A has a close rate of 60% but doesn't follow the rigid 'sales process' and person B has a close rate of 5% but does follow the 'sales process' then who's a better salesperson?! I've never been contracted to teach a team the 'sales process'; only to 'increase their bottom line'. And I do that by teaching them to focus on the buyer and not the text book process.

Supposedly there is an advantage to following the 6 steps above and its: ' achieving a standard with customer interaction in sales'.

But standards don't help when there are so many variables and no 2 people are the same, so how can it possibly be useful to use the same process on them? So sometimes standards end up capping progress. It's not really possible for a student to get higher than an A+, for example.

But they can get lower, right?

If, like me, you think that the more money the better then you wouldn't want to cap that by using a standard sales process, would you?

Enough of the diversion, lets recap: the sales process needs to be about noticing verbal and non verbal cues that allow us to pitch our product or service in just the right way for the customer to buy.