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and they try to create interest from the demo but they think that's the sales process they get the wrong people to the demo it's not a decision maker and the outcome of the demo is that that person who was demoed to it gets to this is nice to have and the sales people spend all their valuable time chasing prospects that aren't gonna get any further than this is nice to have so welcome hi Dave a George how are you I would want to talk to you today about sales process I mean you've written a lot about that and the book contains a lot of information about that your baseline and selling book so why is that so important do you think why is sales process so critical that's a fantastic question especially now if we put it in the context of where we are in spring of 2020 with a sluggish economy that everyone's gonna have to dig out of in a hurry it's gonna require three critical skills one is that salespeople must be able to sell value because companies are gonna be squeezing them for price and there's just not gonna be any margin to give away everybody's gonna have to maintain margin so value will be at the top of the food chain for sellers and in order to sell value it requires that sales people be able to be effective and taking a consultative approach and we know only 15% of all sales people are any good at that and the third thing that's gonna require is that salespeople can qualify thoroughly and effectively so that they're not wasting their time on opportunities that they're not gonna win and in order to take a consultative approach which supports selling value and thorough qualifying it's gonna require sales process that incorporates all three of those things in a meaningful articulate way and by articulate and meaningful I mean the sales process is properly staged and that it's properly sequenced and I think people get today that sales process is important but I don't think they understand the importance of staging and sequencing so can't post you their name so I remember first I was I attended one of your trainings on sales process and you said early on in the training that it has to be I think you said staged and milestone based yes and I remember back then I was wondering okay I've never heard anyone say that in that way so how could how could you describe in another way because I think a lot of people when they think about sales process they think about the drop-down list in their CRM right so what do you mean by staged and milestone based well staged makes it comparable to CRM it's the thing that ties sales process to CRM and that and you can call the stages whatever you want but probably the four most generic stage names would be suspect prospect qualified and closable so if we had a four stage process and a process could have more stages it could have fewer stages but four is pretty standard it's the best practice um different things are happening so in a suspect stage those are the those would house the milestones required to get a first meeting and in the prospect stage also the discovery call that would contain the milestones necessary to tell us we have a real prospect and in the qualified stage that would have the milestones to be achieved to tell us that we have a thoroughly qualified opportunity and in the closeable stage that would include the milestones necessary to win the deal so the staging is categorizing a set of milestones the milestones are steps but not just any steps they're steps that tell us we've moved forward in the process not we've done something because we were supposed to do it but the step the step is a milestone that tells us we're further along than we were before we're closer to closing than we were before so you need to differentiate between just a plain old step this is where we send this crap out this is where we share this information and a milestone this is where we have met the actual decision maker and gotten them personally engaged so there is a difference between a step and a milestone so then the activity versus progress is that another way that's a great way of putting it yeah and then the most important of all is sequencing see the milestone has to be on the right stage and and for most companies they're not they're all over the place they're mixed and when they're when they're cross pollinated on stage they have the cumulative effect of not doing anything for you when the process is properly sequenced the process builds upon itself and each achieved milestone makes it that much easier to achieve the next milestone in the process I'll give you an example when solution selling was popular and a lot of technology companies were using solutions selling and we come in to so many companies that were struggling coming off of a solution selling sales process that the reason it was so ineffective was that in the first stage of the process was qualifying so we'd see a lot of opportunities wouldn't advance to the next stage because they weren't qualified but they weren't qualified not because they weren't really qualified they weren't qualified because the prospect didn't want to answer the qualifying questions because at that point in the process they had decided that this was important enough they had no incentive to go through qualifying so qualifying can't be an early stage and that's a that's another issue with top of the funnel insights those people that some companies call B DRS or business development reps they're using that antiquated Bant formula and they're trying to prequalify leads for sales people but people don't want to be qualified before they know they want to buy something so they won't answer the questions and it doesn't mean they're not a good process it just means that we've jumped the gun we were out of sequence we're out of sorts and we're not doing ourselves any favors how about methodology how does sales process and methodology differ what's the difference between the two and how that how do they work together so four aligned on what sales processes stages and milestone and moss methodology is how we get from milestone to milestone and stage the stage it's the kind of conversation we need to have to move the process forward so this can be your approach this can be the kinds of questions you would ask this would be the kind of conversation you would expect to have this could be a modeling what our good prospect sounds like at this stage of the call versus what a bad prospect sounds like at this stage of the call but it's a mutual understanding as to what we should be saying to each other and asking to each other as we advance the process so how do you where do you see people falling down on these two topics and process and methodology I think it's the same for both they wing it they knew what comes naturally to them they do what feels comfortable they do what they've always done they do what they were taught and what were they taught talking points features benefits company history so they just dump everything they know and then they expect the prospect to go that's fantastic let's do this or for a technology sale they they make the first stage a demo and they try to create interest from the demo and that's okay you could use a demo as a marketing tool to generate interest they think that's the sales process to a demo and what ends up happening is that they get the wrong people to the demo it's not a decision maker but it's an interested party someone had downloaded a white paper yeah and the outcome of the demo is that that person who was demoed to it gets to this is nice to have this is cool I like it but they haven't gotten them to must-have because they haven't done a discovery call and found out what's going on that this particular software might be a solution for so with it only being nice to have there's no compelling reason for that person to get the decision-maker engaged or to get the money authorized to spend and that's why so many technology companies get all these opportunities into the funnel and the stuff just plain freakin dies after the demo step and the sales people spend all their valuable time chasing prospects that aren't gonna get any further than this is nice to have so how many stages have you seen in the worst this most worst designed sales process you've encountered 800k no I haven't seen more than eight stages but I but I've seen processes with generally not too many milestones but with too few milestones right five milestones seven milestones and in a good solid sales process is probably gonna have fifteen to twenty milestones in four stages right an average of four to six milestones per stage yeah I've seen processes with at least not at least but at most 22 stages stages yeah but but I I mean the reason why is that you can't really represent milestones in a good way in a traditional CRM so that it's the work around it sometimes to create more stages but yeah that's that's horrifying to see well you're in a position to see a lot more sales processes than I might we see the sales process that our clients have before we make wholesale changes to them or tweak them or mill the scorecard for them and you you work with dozens and dozens of firms like curl on and associates who end up getting their clients into membrane for a usable powerful no-nonsense sales specific approach to managing sales process and opportunities and pipeline and prospecting so you you probably get exposed to hundreds and thousands of sales processes yeah it's kind of fun I mean I think one of the big problems I see is that you want to create this perfect process that is just designed for all your customer facing reps no matter if they're selling transactionally or or an enterprise value based sales opportunity so that's that I think is a big mistake people make as well yeah so for a lot of our clients we build multiple processes yeah you know the process that this group uses it's different than the process this group uses for example let's say we're selling food to three different verticals we're selling to large retail big-box stores is one of our channels small specialty boutique retailers is another channel and then contractors is a third Channel and then direct to end users as a fourth Channel and then a fifth channel might be distributors yeah so while the processes won't be completely different and they'll be shared steps they're gonna be nuances for each of those target audiences that are gonna be different yeah yeah and it's it's also interesting if you look at how you will analyze the data if you're gonna be comparing wind weights and deal sizes you don't want to mix and match to two different sales approaches because that's write me wrong exactly cool super this has been very helpful great to Han I love I love your new platform for doing interviews - oh yeah yeah you're the you're the early adopter on this new platform so that look being an early adopter