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the reason we put together this piece we don't often do this piece because it's actually not about the technology this uh the session i'm going to do and the reason we do this is because we got feedback from customers about the sales process itself because we find a lot of our customers have been charged with implementing a process a sales process and they they try to understand it themselves and then they have to deal with the complexity of the software and then figure out how to put it all together okay so that's what i'm going to do i've also seen one thing that uh in my life i've worked with crm software or something related for quite some time you know maybe 20 years or so and the biggest bottleneck i've seen is the biggest issue i've seen is people usually inherit something it's already there and the process is put in place or if somebody is putting it in place the first time they instrument something and then it just sticks forever as generations of people start to use it and the biggest bottleneck i've seen is people don't have a very good handle of their sales process before they model it into the software right and so that's why it falls apart because the clarity of what they're doing isn't actually reflected isn't actually there therefore it's not reflected in the software so that's what i'm trying to do over here and so let's go so we'll cover three things uh elements of a sales process i'll walk through some examples of it and then if you codify for your own business what we're talking here that will help you get more out of those sessions so i like to go back this is one of the few people i actually have ever respected in the in the management guru space drucker says that uh you know this is a this is so fundamentally simple right there's no jargon here there's nothing everybody just gets it and and i think a sales process is really focused on getting that first part done yeah so the other part is of course the role of what i talked about earlier customer success retention loyalty all of that has come into place but fundamentally you can't retain a customer until you get them right so this is the fundamental aspect of a sales process again you'll see all these words as soon as you go into the technology screens you'll see all these all this jargon and words thrown at you leads accounts contacts all that stuff so i'm trying to put some perspective into this and so put it down to some basics so we can all follow so lead is something that could potentially turn into a customer if you're good it will if your process is off it won't you know so it's as simple as that and how this happens essentially can be grouped into three broad areas so you have something called generating a lead because you've got to find the person first who could potentially become your customer and then you've got to find out if that works is that person appropriate for your business are you appropriate for their problem that's the qualifying process right and then fundamentally once you've done that you're going to engage towards acquiring that customer so you go through a process there's all kinds of things involved in that that is the actual selling process so if you look at how this breaks down in organizations it's roughly like this it's the focus of the left two are usually the focus of a marketing group and and the one on the right is the focus of a sales group but as we discussed in that earlier session software evolved on its own right so sales software evolved first before a lot of the marketing software came into place so they started usurping some of the functions of the marketing stuff so you'll find things like campaigns and leads and stuff in sales software so what you're seeing is actually a vestige of history and ideally you would have these really classified into marketing and sales and the reason i separate these two is because the technology is different the people are different in most organizations the kind of skills you need for a marketing job entirely different from a sales job you all know that right and i i'll tell you speaking from a perspective of software it's fundamentally different you can hire a person out of college and you can make them a marketer in a year or two you can't make them a salesperson because there's there's that certain level of uh experience required a certain level of of empathy emotional uh uh maturity things that you need to be a successful salesperson so what a lot of companies do is they combine this thing together and sales people are typically expensive resources marketing is cheaper so that's one good reason to think of it separately another thing is marketing can be easily outsourced sales almost never so that's part of it too you can if all you're doing is the distributorship but but fundamentally most businesses do their sales they want that relationship with the customer so it's good to think of these as separately because a lot of time we put mix expensive resources and make them do stuff that can be done with less expensive resources so it's a good differentiation to keep in your mind okay so how does your business generate leads is it online or is it offline another way to think about it is who does it and this goes back to that point i brought up about marketing and sales who does it in your organization it's important question because it it fundamentally determines how much money you spend on this and the resources you put on this next thing is we touched on this too is it considered sales or marketing role has lead generation evolved over time you see a lot more the online has something to do with it right some things have been inviolate like uh customer referrals events trade shows we use both so here's some ideas on how to generate leads i'll read them out of the type of website email no one actually mentioned email although i'm sure many of you do but email is a big form of lead generation trade shows we talked about how about good old cold calling pick up the phone and call right that's an example of something you wouldn't put an experienced person on and lis somebody asked me uh earlier about how we use lists i don't have too much faith in that but i largely because there's so many people vending this stuff that most of what you get is junk but i do advocate building your own list and social media walk-ins if you have a if you have a physical organization people actually come in right so some ideas are leads so let's talk about the next thing so once you get the lead and remember the next process you qualify them or as marketers like to say you nurture them something parental about this whole thing so when you have a prospect you have to nurture them so how do you nurture these leads okay so you take region and then you bring in the right person okay that's one one way to assign it it's a common way to do it sometimes people do it larger companies look at people with special expertise something comes in from health care they put a person from health care or somebody who knows that so here's another question to ask what information are you tracking so you've now got a lead and you're connecting with the lead and you're going through a qualifying process so what information you track you touched on some of that so you're looking for are you looking for what are you trying to learn about the customer you have to understand that so then in your nurturing process you actually connect you collect some of that information how do you schedule it what do you how do you do follow-ups what happens when elite comes in today we have all this automated software how are we using it when a lead comes in through an email campaign what do you do how what's your policy for instance we have a policy uh that when elite comes in within 24 hours it has someone has to send out a response and you know when the volume gets high the response is i will get back to you so man that's that's not what i'm talking about but nonetheless it is it's a kind of policy and we have that soon as something comes it makes a huge difference we've actually run some experiments to see in fact for us we even said less than 24 hours we once ran an experiment to see what the difference is if we tried to do it in the first hour okay just for kicks and somebody ran uh this guy peter runs our sales run uh ran this whole experiment and he put up all these stats and he showed he did this over two different periods of time and he actually showed that the one r did significantly better in terms of people connecting back with us so there's something i guess it means that in some businesses when people are reaching out to you they have an immediate problem you know so and it shows apart from showing your responsiveness they also have a problem that needs to be solved and oftentimes it is urgent so here's a big one you could spend a lot of time on this so if you don't articulate this for your business you're not you're never going to find that out you're going to chase things yesterday we had a session with partners and with zoho partners and one of the questions i heard was you know we get customers from their perspective they're looking for leads right and they want to engage with them they want stuff they want consulting and it goes on and on sometimes they want us a field visit a site trip come to my office and how do you know when to stop how do you know that this person is getting somewhere or or it's something valuable to you are they willing to pay those the kinds of things do how do you know you have a real selling opportunity so this is part of the qualification process so i put down some ideas on on how you might actually generalize this for a business so you assign the lead to somebody so that's the first thing when you get leads you assign it so someone's responsible for it and there's a name against every lead that comes in and hopefully that's done automatically you should that should be part of what your crm software does it should assign it automatically there's a follow-up you mandate a follow-up so in in crm parlance that means you set up a task which says that in 24 hours this first this person will get a reminder saying you got this lead have you done this yet right and once that process starts so that takes care of the first thing that you want to automate you don't want that to be the volition of your sales rep at the volition of your sales rep you want that to happen automatically it gets assigned and they follow up and then you start your process of gauging interest you gauge intent i talked about this example you want to understand the intent is there a purchase intent here specifically you look for opportunities someone else pointed out that i like to do site visits because when i go there i find out other problems they have it's happened to me a lot of times they get on the phone and somebody's asking something and you back them off a little bit and i'm not necessarily trying to sell them something but i find out there's a bigger problem or there's some other allied problem and maybe i'm qualified to solve that and i endear myself more to that customer because of that so that's the qualification process itself so now we're in the selling process we've got we qualified something we've determined that there's some sort of an opportunity and we're ready to sell so sometimes in organizations some organizations this is passed to a different part of the organization so sales team would pick it up and there's a notion of a conversion so if you see the word converted that really means it's moved from a sales marketing process to a sales process that's what it means even if it's done by the sales same person that's what it signifies so it marks the transition into a formal sales process and now you have somebody who's really a sales prospect so keep in mind this process sounds simple but it's very getting this right will have a huge impact on the resources your organization spends if you do poor qualification over time you'll basically have people chasing poor leads and you never get this right the first time you never get this right the first time you do it you sit down you figure out what we should change was customer size even relevant for example you might come up with that maybe geography was relevant you know maybe something else is relevant so you bring that back into your criteria and you keep uh refining it so let's put some formalism around it what exactly is it uh we've now the sales process and now as soon as you go into the crm you'll see all that jargon all over again so i'm going to simplify it for you a bit so it's basically a sequence of progressive stages a sequence means it happens one after the other typically and progressive means one is ahead of the other so you've when you've gone from stage one to stage two something has happened some progress has been made or at least you think some progress has been made it may or may not end in a sale but to all intents it appears that you've gone further with that customer so that is essentially a sales process a sequence of progressive stages so when you start using your crm that's the first thing you need to model in it and this is one thing i've seen with a lot of people who use crms they don't do this right they pick up whatever the default model in the crm is and just use it this is specific to your business so at any point in time multiple prospects sales prospects may be at different stages so you may have 35 people you're dealing with and let's say you have a four-step process you may have 16 of them in the first stage and a few more in the second and so on and two or three that you're dealing with in the final stage of your sales process so this collectively this notion again to to familiarize you with the terms the prospects and their stages is what people call a sales pipeline for business right so it's your pipeline think of it as a pipeline of deals what's coming through it and over time i used to run a sales team at least a couple of times before and a lot of this is heuristics you know there's no it's there's no there's no logic or model to all this you just figure it out by experience you figure out things like if my if i have a four stage pipeline i would have a guideline which said i need about 20 things in stage one before on average i get one thing in stage four right so that's the pipeline that thing never comes from the software and that's the problem people use the software and think your sales is going to improve the software is just a way for you to model it and use that information better to make these decisions and deduce these inferences okay so you understand and see we've done this over nine months or or or a year and a half and we're figuring out that if i have about about 15 or 20 over here i'm going to wind up with something in this quarter so if you have somebody working for you or you're the sales rep yourself then you have a sense for what this thing looks like so people use the terms are your sales people padding their numbers well this is a good way to find out how many leads do you have right and then do they did they go through the qualification criteria we had because if you run a sales team you'll constantly find that sales people are very optimistic and they well they need to be optimistic right and they will always have a lot of leads you'll always have a fantastic pipeline and they'll run through the software and they'll run all the probabilities and you'll see this revenue that's going to come up for the quarter looking really good and it doesn't happen right that's so the purpose of the software is to test your intuition and to improve it it's not simply to execute a set of automated steps okay so how do you how should you actually define your sales process so stages we talked about that so are they actually progressive and this is not an obvious question because i've seen this in software sales sometimes they start at stage seven in a ten step process sometimes they start at one it's it's hard to predict where it starts sometimes you think i've just done a demo and i've talked to the to the buyer and it doesn't happen and you think you're on stage eight so sales automation software tends to attribute percentages and probabilities to this take that with a pinch of salt i know some of my colleagues will advocate this over the next couple of days we take a pinch of salt because it's it's only as good as your own intuition so use that mark it up change it see if it really is predictive so how do you know you have the right process you've done all this you figured out your process you put it together how do you know there's no real easy way you only know by the results you see so you put this thing out you have it for a year you have it for a couple of years and you see what's working what did i had a six step process was step four really needed did that help me how can i let's look at the deals that we did how many of them went through four and that seemed to turn it you know that's the kind of way you use the software it's really like i said and i'll keep repeating this it's not some piece of automation that's going to magically bring revenue it's simply a way for you to deal with a massive information in a smart way derive inferences and model it again quickly in a better way so if you look at stages and you open you know i actually had someone go through the top four or five crms and pull out everything that they have and look at what they have as stages i'm sure some of these synths are ours as well so you have all these stages what you'll see if you pick up a software a crm software you have all these stages now how do you supposed to figure out which of these apply to you right the best thing to do is cut through all of that just figure out what works for your system so here's one that i put together last week to try and represent a generic sales process so i said okay and let me try it by you so i said you you present the value you remember the person is now a qualified prospect otherwise you shouldn't even be here let me say that you shouldn't get into a sales process unless you qualified somebody that's the role of marketing if you're here already and you're talking to a customer the first time you're not going to get good ratios simply because you haven't done your homework so you're here and you're presenting the value of what you do well oftentimes there are issues with it there are objections there are issues there's other things they have you'll deal with that right because you didn't anticipate that you did not know that in fact when you presented the value that's what happens so you put that together you go back and now you're trying to see if they actually you're trying to get a gauge of the commitment of the of the person you're dealing with so there are various ways to find commitment in uh in in software they use the classic thing do you have a budget uh you know i hate that you know that's a very uninventive question to ask if you have a budget so you try and gauge people's intent by seeing what they do what they know how important it is to their own success stuff like that right and those are things that are better predictors of their intent than whether they have a budget the other thing is decision makers so a lot of times you're dealing with somebody who may be a front or who may be the person who just picked up the phone you don't know if that is that the decision is going to be made there so you've got to find out who are the people who are making a decision sometimes it's decision makers sometimes it's people who need to be in the process if you deal with large companies there's always that pugnacious uh procurement guy you know and you if you haven't got the procurement guy in if you're dealing with a big company you know you're nowhere close to the end of the sale you know because he has he or she has to give their blessing so that's an example of somebody you need to identify sometimes you identify a blocker so you're selling a piece of software and there's an i.t manager there who doesn't want your software because it makes their job maybe it puts maybe they don't have a role after that right so you got to identify the blocker and see who that is and work that into your sales process so that's again this is why experience fits into this process it's not about technology it's about common sense in your technology you propose a solution you negotiate some terms and then you close off the sale so i'm going to sum it all up for you so this is the sales process the generation part the qualifying part thing to take away is you build it on your own see what works for you and separate the skills if you have the ability to separate the skills put the most valuable people to the right so some considerations in in designing a sales process i put this together based on my own experience i'm going to start at the top left and move around is your process clear do people get it do they know the roles involved do they know the steps the stage is the process is it clear can you explain it that's the first test if you know if you actually have a process the second thing i'll talk about is is it repeatable so did you do it because of that one specific deal or is this something that actually makes sense did it work over time did you do this last year and you're still doing it this year usually you've inherited something that head of sales put together and it worked on some deal they did they did an rfp they'll have rfp over there rfps request for proposal right because that guy worked with some big government deals that maybe is not even part of your sales process right because that he put it in there this is how sales happens in a lot of companies a sales guy comes in he actually was using a crm somewhere else he or she and puts it together in the new place and and creates the same process and everybody's supposed to follow that right so you have to question that see if that works repeatable third one is predictable so it's not specific to an owner so you look at this it works for everybody it's not a particular person is doing it if a different type of person is using this it should work for them too that's something that's predictable can i look at the system and actually say that i can gauge that maybe i'll have 10 deals by the end of this quarter can i have that level of predictor roughly maybe maybe eight to 10 deals something like that can that determination be made by independent people and that's the last part you know so can you forecast revenue the same way can does it work the same way for everybody or is it an artifact of a person's thinking so these are the tests they're more qualitative rather than measurable as you can see and but this is what i was sitting down and thinking of all the things i've done how would i generalize that and say if i were to hand this over i would say give me your deal let me run your deal on it and see if it works you know or give me pick a different person who didn't come from this organization and see if it works for them you know so that's the way i would test this out so this is why you actually would need a crm you've got your process down you understand it you want to achieve these kinds of goals and now you're talking to the software and now you're investigating the software so this is the kind of homework you have to do a lot of times this is not done you know then you're winding up trying to work with the software so your focus is now on on badgering the software rather than getting your sales process down so i'm going to give you a couple of examples and here's something i use the same format for for car sales so if you look on the left that's what people do now website dealer walk-in so on look at the qualification process sometimes it's just the fact that they showed up on your door is a qualification process and that works for automobiles for auto companies because the person just walked in that's a qualification right there maybe they know about the car they're trying to buy that's another qualification so they're closer to making a decision perhaps they're ready with credit right so this thing works look at the sales process there similar to what we talked about earlier you propose that you understand you know people want specific things in their car you put together a package you go to price you go to the negotiation finance if you've you know you when you buy a car you realize how much what what the credit and financing how much of a signal it is to people in the sales process because most people finance their cars so that's a simple process uh here's the process for software so you see similar types of things on the left for generating calls let's focus on the right a lot of times in software you have to demo the product because people don't get it and you have to do that sometimes we demo products too early i've been in sales processes where i pull back pull people back from demoing the product and a lot of people tend to do it because they say the product speaks for itself our own guys do it and sometimes it's a good thing a lot of times it prevents you from understanding their need it prevents you from doing the things i talked about earlier understanding the need looking for a fit using the qualification because when you're demoing you're not listening you're talking right so that's but it's an essential stage a lot of people want to see that similar things offering a trial we had a comment here about free software that actually is true in this in the software business because a lot of people do that there's a notion of you can try the product at no risk no cost propose a solution close you even have free products so you can see this of what you would need to do if you haven't constructed your own sales process look at this and actually go through this exercise know what your lead sources are if you want to go and explore something else mark that out for exploration know what your qualification criteria are what are you looking for let's say you got 100 leads what would you look for outline your sales process and stages we talked about that just see what works start from something like the picture i had cut it down if it doesn't make sense see what you want to automate as soon as you get a lead you want an email sent to the right person as soon as somebody reached out to you you want to send a confirmation mail that's where a crm helps to put the glue and automate the mundane so look for the things that you actually want to automate and standardize and build that into the system so that would be things like tasks like workflows stuff like that look for things you want to automate so it doesn't become the individual whim of the individual salesperson it becomes a standard in the organization flowchart your entire process draw it on a piece of paper if you can't order a paper you don't know it at least that's the way it works for me if i can't draw any if i can't write anything down i really don't know it and so put that in a piece of paper and then approach your crm okay thank you