4 Tips for Using a Sales Process to Improve Your Wins

In everyday life, we use terms like “habits,” “patterns,” or “routines” to describe common behaviors we follow. And we follow them mainly because they work.

In sales, these habits or routines, better known as “best practices,” originate from trial and error and represent the shortest known path to sales success.

Although it's rarely intentional, more often than not, people don’t set out to make their lives harder. It doesn't make intellectual sense to deviate from what works, making success more difficult to attain. Yet salespeople often can't help changing up their sales process every time they engage with a client. Personal experiences might influence someone to rely on what they know from past experiences or simply on their own idea of a "better way."

As you might imagine, their results end up being unreliable and inconsistent, and they end up not being as successful as they could've been. They may not realize that the answer to turning around their fluctuating numbers is to adopt sales best practices that work.

Embracing the Art of Standard Sales Best Practices

Our company’s core team members and founders have made full careers in sales. But don’t think that the best practices we believe in today came to us without thoughtfulness, planning, and a few missteps along the way. We know how challenging it can be to create and follow an effective, reliable sales process.

When we launched our organization, we didn’t have any sales best practices to follow and had to forge our own path. We learned along the way what works and what doesn’t. Our past mistakes seem obvious to us now, but they certainly didn’t at the time.

For instance, we assumed that all prospective advisers would learn, act, and behave as we did with the same tools we used. It didn’t take long to learn that although each advisor we screened to join Sales Xceleration had a very similar work background, their behavioral styles were often dramatically different So in order to greatly minimize onboarding an advisor who would be a poor fit, we started requiring our prospective advisors to undergo behavioral assessments so we could compare them against a desired benchmark.

Once we understood where an advisor was from a baseline perspective, we could deliver the right information following a specific process. The process stayed the same, but we had multiple processes we could use.

Improving Your Sales Process With Best Practices

I truly believe that one of the secrets of how to be successful in sales is doing the same things that work again and again. If you agree, start structuring a sales process that nets you more wins by following a few tips:

Fail fast. When you’re still determining your desired best practices, try something—anything. This helps you fail fast and see what doesn’t make sense. Holding on to an unreliable, losing methodology too long keeps you from hitting your goals sooner. So rack up those fails.

Document your sales process. When you pinpoint a successful best practice process, write it down. Ideally, you’ll develop a plan that includes detailed action items. Having these tasks in writing allows you to remember and repeat everything. It also gives you the opportunity to share your findings with your peers and employees. Your detailed sales best practices should be embedded in your customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Follow your documented process. The only way to know whether your sales process works is by following it consistently. If you make zigs and zags every time, you’ll never know where the gaps are or where you need to make improvements. On the other hand, by sticking to your process, you can pick out places to test something different. It’s like performing an A/B split test on a piece of marketing. When everything else is done the same way, making a small tweak in your method half the time will reveal whether the tweak makes it better, worse, or has no effect.

Stay open for best practice adjustments. After your sales process has been in place for a while, it may start to produce fewer returns. If you’re sure you haven’t deviated from it, you can assume that it could be time to make adjustments. The buyer's journey is a dynamic process. Therefore, your selling processes should follow suit.

It’s surprisingly freeing to have effective best practices to help you become a stronger sales professional. Adhere to your outline and be patient. Before long, you can start predicting your outcomes.

Mark Thacker is the president of Sales Xceleration, a firm specializing in sales strategy, process, and execution. Mark has a 33-year history of sales leadership and success in diverse industries.