Visualizing your sales process is crucial for increasing conversion ratios and providing your team with the peace of mind that comes from clarity and consistency.
By clearly defining each step from lead generation to closing the deal, you eliminate guesswork and ensure that everyone knows exactly what to do at each stage. This not only helps in avoiding missed opportunities but also makes it easier to spot and fix any inefficiencies that might be slowing you down.
- Increases conversion rates by ensuring timely and targeted interactions with leads.
- Provides clarity and consistency, giving your team peace of mind and reducing uncertainty.
- Aligns with the customer journey, enhancing satisfaction and improving the likelihood of successful sales.
- Identifies and fixes inefficiencies, streamlining your sales operations.
- Supports effective use of tools and technology, improving efficiency and control over your sales pipeline.
How to Map Out Your Sales Process
When you want to generate leads and find new customers to achieve your business goals, it’s essential first to map out your current sales process. This guide will walk you through how to do this in four key steps.
Free tools to help you get started and create a clear sales process
- https://draw.io (we used this to create the images below)
- https://miro.com/
- Pen and Paper. If you are a bit old-fashioned, using a pen and paper might be the best for you.
The Start of the Sales Process
Your sales process typically begins when the marketing team identifies a potential customer (a lead) who is ready to hear from your sales team. This is the point where marketing passes the lead to sales for follow-up.
From the moment a lead is handed over to sales until they make a purchase and become a customer, the path they take is what we call the sales process. For some businesses, this journey is simple, with just a few steps. For others, it can be more complicated, involving multiple stages.
No matter how straightforward or complex your process is, it’s incredibly valuable to map it out. Here are the four key elements to focus on when doing this:
- The Customer Journey: Understand the different stages a potential customer goes through, from first contact to making a purchase.
- Sales Steps and actions required: Break down the actions your sales team takes at each stage, like making the first call, sending a proposal, or negotiating a deal. Also, break down the actions that the potential new client completes to become a customer.
- Sales Blueprint: Create a visual guide that shows each step in your process, so everyone on your team knows what to do and when.
- Tools and Technology: Identify the tools you use to track customer information and manage your sales process, like a CRM system or even Excel
Need help with your sales process?
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Step 1: Define the Lifecycle Stages
A potential customer goes through several stages before making a purchase. These stages are similar across many industries and products. Most companies create their own interpretations of the different stages. It is recommended to create a document with your definitions to get your team aligned. For example, have a discussion about what a ‘lead’ is.
The basic stages are:
- Awareness / Initial Interest (Lead): This is someone who has shown some level of interest in your business. Maybe they downloaded an e-book, filled out a form on your website, or signed up for a newsletter. At this point, you don’t yet know if they are a good fit for your product or service.
- Ready to Engage (Qualified Lead): At this stage, the person is ready to be contacted by your sales team. They fit the profile of your ideal customer based on their actions and characteristics, such as their job role or company type.
- Serious Consideration (Opportunity): Now, your sales team steps in to learn more about the person’s needs. They’ll find out if this potential customer has the authority to make purchasing decisions, if they have an urgent need, and if they have the budget for your product or service. If everything aligns, they become a strong potential customer, known as an Opportunity.
- Becoming a Customer (Customer): If everything goes well, the Opportunity turns into a Customer. They make a purchase and officially become one of your clients. If not, they might go back to being qualified until there is a new opportunity.
- Happy Customer (Evangelist): Even after someone becomes a customer, your relationship doesn’t end. By providing excellent service, you can turn your customers into loyal promoters of your business. These happy customers can help bring in new leads through referrals and positive reviews.
Step 2: Define the Deal Stages
Before a potential customer decides to buy from you, they go through several stages. These stages are common across different industries and products. It is the best practise to use the ‘past tense’ for deal stage names, so you are certain that something has already happened and there is no ambiguity about the title. For example, ‘Proposal Sent’ is much more clean than ‘Proposal’. Here’s an example:
- New Lead
- Qualified Lead
- First Meeting Scheduled
- Design/Engineering Process Started
- Proposal Made
- Contract Signed
- Deal Won/Lost
Defining these stages for your specific products and industry ensures clarity on how your sales team should proceed at each step and provides an overview of where your deals stand in the pipeline.
Step 3: Create Your Own Sales Blueprint
With your Lifecycle and Deal Stages defined, the next step is to draw / create a Sales Blueprint. This is essentially a roadmap or schematic that outlines your sales process.
Your Sales Blueprint should include:
- Each step or stage of the sales process
- Each status or ‘lifecycle stage’ of the customer
- Actions required at each step of the process.
- Please consider both the steps you have to take, and the steps the lead / potential customers have to take.
Here’s a simplified example of a Sales Blueprint:
Need help with your sales process?
*Schedule a 60-minute sales consultation and make the drawing together with one of our experts without any upfront investment
Step 4: Identify and align your tools
Now that you have a clear outline of your sales process, there’s one more important step: organizing your tools and processes so you can use the process created. Try to start simple.
Start with what you already use
Think about the tools you currently use to keep track of your customers and sales. For many, this might be something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet or a basic CRM system. You might also be using email to communicate with customers, and maybe a basic invoicing system to handle payments.
Understand how data flows through your sales process
- Customer Data: In your system, you might have a place where you store all your customer information—like names, contact details, and notes about their interactions with your business.
- Tracking Leads: You could have another location to track leads, where you note down when a lead first contacts you, what stage they are in (e.g., interested, ready to buy), and any follow-up actions needed.
- Sales Pipeline: Create a simple pipeline in Excel or in your CRM to see where each potential sale is in the process. This might include columns for things like “Contacted,” “Meeting Scheduled,” “Proposal Sent,” and “Deal Closed.”
Tip: If you don’t have a CRM system. Apply for the free version of HubSpot via this link: https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm. HubSpot has a great user experience and is easy to use, LeadHQ can help with the configuration and training if required.
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Moving Data: Think about how information moves through your system. For example, when someone moves from being a lead to a customer, you might copy their details from the leads sheet to a new customer sheet. This helps you keep everything organized.
Even in a basic system like this, it’s important to know where your data is stored and how it’s used. For example:
- Leads and Contacts: Are all your leads and customer contacts in one place?
- Sales Progress: Do you know where each deal stands at any given time?
- Customer Follow-Up: How do you track when to follow up with a customer or send an invoice?
Make Your System Work for You
By organizing your system and processes logically, you can manage your sales process effectively. The key is to make sure everything is easy to find and that it becomes a habit. If you are lost, you can always physically print the blueprint and put it on your desk.
Need Help Organizing Your Sales Process?
If you require more guidance on how to organize your sales process, we offer training that can help you set up a simple but effective system. Whether you’re just starting or looking to improve, we can provide tips and templates to make managing your sales process easier.
*Schedule a 60-minute sales consultation and make the drawing together with one of our experts without any upfront investment