Set the Foundation for Success with a Trusted Sales Process
Investing in a Trusted Sales Process sets the foundation for your efforts to drive sales excellence and achieve your revenue and profitability goals.
We recently spoke with Brad Giddens, Senior Business Development Executive at CalTech, about CalTech’s Trusted Sales Process and its impact on the company’s exponential growth. CalTech is a regional IT solutions provider to banks and financial institutions with headquarters in central Texas and has worked with CPS on a variety of consulting and training projects over the years. Our relationship began, though, with a Trusted Sales Process engagement, and Brad agrees that it set the foundation.
"Our Trusted Sales Process provides a proven sales process to go back and look at time and time again. Without the process, our success rate at CalTech would not be near what it is today."
What is a Trusted Sales Process?
A trusted sales process captures best practices of your top salespeople and presents them in an easy-to-understand and structured way. It identifies the key stages of the sale for your specific company (think Identify – Qualify – Develop – Propose – Close in standard terms) and the key activities that align to these stages using the lens of T-R-U-S-T.
A robust trusted sales process identifies your objective for each stage of the sale, and the customer outcome as well. At the same time, a trusted sales process aligns to your customer’s needs and expectations…and flexes to accommodate their specific buying process, including the digital research that takes place so frequently today.
How does a Trusted Sales Process help you and your team? What’s the value?
A trusted sales process provides a roadmap for both opportunity management and sales excellence. Specifically, a trusted sales process:
Provides a common vernacular across sales teams, regions, and markets
Facilitates pipeline management and forecasting
Sets the foundation for best practices-based sales coaching
Establishes the foundation for sales training program design
Enables consistent adoption of best practices to reduce inefficiency in the sales process
Provides roadmap to win more opportunities…just in time use for sales opportunities
Results in wins and revenue!
As Brad Giddens Suggests:
“If you can identify those different scenarios or times, when you're at your best, and when you win most often, why would we not want to repeat that?”
How can CPS help you develop a Trusted Sales Process?
CPS has developed more than 50 trusted sales processes across a wide variety of industries and brings extensive knowledge of sales best practices and tools to the table as we design sales processes for our clients.
We can scale our engagement to meet the needs of your company, large or small. The key steps in a Trusted Sales Process engagement are as follows:
Perform cross-functional sales team interviews
Synthesize input and identify best practices
Document proposed new/updated process, including client and industry best practices
Discern activities with each process step using the lens of TRUST
Confirm process with key stakeholders
In addition, once your Trusted Sales Process is designed, CPS can help you support
implementation through training and ongoing coaching.
What are the critical success factors for implementing a Trusted Sales Process?
As we have helped our customers implement their trusted sales processes, we’ve noticed a number of key factors that drive success. Specifically:
Embedding some of your sales tools in the sales process
Aligning marketing collateral to stages of the sales process
Knowing the terminology of the sales process and using it in all of your opportunity conversations
Training the sales team to follow the sales process
Training the sales managers to coach to the sales process
Integrating the sales process into your CRM
Assigning a process owner or advocate
How can a Trusted Sales Process help your company?
To answer this question, let’s return to the story of CalTech as told by Brad Giddens:
"CalTech engaged CPS to develop their trusted sales process nearly eleven years ago. We have tweaked our process over time to reflect changes in market dynamics, customer buying processes, and sales approaches, but the principles remain intact today. We use our trusted sales process to guide our sales activities – charting the path forward for the pursuit of specific opportunities and checking in along the way when risks and customer concerns are identified. In addition, our sales leadership team uses the trusted sales process for coaching – helping the sales team to plan next steps, but also to identify when to circle back to address an overlooked activity. And the trusted sales process also helps us identify skills gaps and actions, including training, to address them.
CalTech’s trusted sales process is integrated into our CRM and provides the basis for conversations about pipeline, forecasting, and the sales stage of each opportunity using consistent language. In our business, the trusted sales process also informs staffing decisions as opportunities that require additional resources move towards closure.
Most importantly, our Trusted Sales Process has helped drive our business success. CalTech has experienced 115% new sales growth last year vs. the prior year."
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