Sales Process: Lead the Sales Process to Transform Your Selling Performance

 

Leading the sales process can, quite simply, transform your sales performance.

By taking control and leading the sale at your own pace, you will significantly improve your sales process, sales forecasting accuracy and the certainty with which you hit your sales targets and earn your sales commissions.

You will be able to take control of your own destiny and will be viewed by peers as a leader who makes things happen. Furthermore, you will be able to control the pace of the buyer’s decision-making process in each and every sale.

So, how does a sales person successfully lead the sales process?

To take charge and lead the sales process, it is essential that you:

• Create a compelling event in the future to get action now.
• Plan the sale backwards to lead the sale forwards.
• Be proactive in your leadership of the sales process.
• Develop a champion in both companies to really make things happen.

Now let’s take a look at each of these crucial elements in turn.

Create a compelling event in the future to get action now

A compelling event in the future provides the buyer with a hard deadline, by which time they must realise the benefits of your solution. This creates urgency in the mind of the buyer and encourages them to act immediately.

By creating a compelling event, you will create a clear, irrefutable and time-bound common objective that you and the buyer must work towards to achieve a win-win situation (i.e. a win for the buyer in terms of benefits, and a win for yourself in terms of closing the sale on time).

The compelling event should be a major external pressure which poses a distinct challenge to the organisation you are selling into. It is important to exploit external pressures because they are not within the buyer’s sphere of control. If you pick the right external pressure this will have a major impact because the buyer will not be able to simply ignore it or make it go away.

A compelling event might, for example, be the end of the financial year for either a commercial or public sector. Alternatively, it could be a major sporting event, such as the 2012 Olympics for a London-based firm that organises travel and accommodation for overseas tourists. For gift and food retailers in the western world, it may be a popular holiday season, such as Christmas or Easter.

 

http://www.sterlingchase.com/2011/08/lead-the-sales-process-to-transform-your-selling-performance

==================================================================