Sales Process Breakdowns: The Devil’s In the Details

This is the first installment in a series on three common breakdowns in the expansion stage sales process. You can read the introductory post to the series here.

Failing to document opportunity creation is a common misstep in a weak sales process

There are times when indifference to detail isn’t a bad thing; when it doesn’t matter so much how you reached an end result, as long as you actually achieved it.

Like, for example, when a pro baseball player hits a walk-off home run to win the World Series. No one cares what the pitch was, what his swing mechanics were, or how far the ball traveled. It cleared the wall and, at that point, the rest is minutiae.

In the expansion stage sales process, however, that aloofness and nonchalance to detail can be deadly.

Especially when it comes to opportunity creation. 

For early stage companies, most sales processes start with qualified opportunities. But there are actually a handful of steps that lead up to that point. Among them, you should know:

• How a particular opportunity was made aware of your solution.
• And once they were made aware, what you did to move them from a suspect, to a prospect, to a qualified opportunity.

Sure, when things are going well and sales are booming, it’s easy to overlook those things. Why bother, right? Money’s coming in and new customers are lining up at the door. So who cares what made them aware. If they’re buying, you must be doing something right.

And maybe you are. But how do you know what you’re doing right if you’re not tracking it?

That information becomes critically important as companies grow or go through stagnant sales periods. After all, if you know how prospects are being made aware of your product, how much work it takes to close them, and why they ultimately choose your solution, you’ll be able to create a much more repeatable and informed opportunity creation process that increases your chances of sustained revenue growth.

If you ignore that data, you’ll find yourself up a Class 5 rapid without a paddle when things start to go awry.

The bottom line is that awareness is really the first stage in any sales process. If you’re able to identify the right customer persona and make a large quantity of people with it aware of who you are, the likelihood of creating qualified opportunities goes up significantly. And the only way to truly understand awareness is to document how opportunities are created in the first place.

In other words, what sales and marketing strategies have been successful in taking previously unaware suspects and transitioning them to opportunities? And, as CRM software company Avidian writes on its blog, where are those leads coming from (ads, referrals, cold calls, etc.)? What about your definition of lead? Do your marketing and sales departments share the same concrete definition?

But, as I mentioned in my intro to this series, each of those variables are simply brushstrokes in a much bigger picture.

Sales success at the expansion stage depends on your sales process – it’s the foundation that everything else sits on. If it’s buttoned up and efficient, then things like awareness and opportunity creation will take care of themselves.

On the other hand, if your sales process is a flimsy, compromised platform, then it’s only a matter of time before breakdowns (like opportunity creation) begin to occur and your house of cards collapses in on itself.

Photo by: elycefeliz