Streamline sales stages in crm for technology industry

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all right i'm going to go ahead and begin my name is ricky thacker i am the regional sales manager for north and south america based out of the austin texas office this session is weirdly named crm basics but we're not going to look at the crm at all so it's basically the foundations of a sales process or elements of a sales process that's what we're going to talk about if you don't have that in place the crm is not going to be of much use to you it's just going to be a really complicated database we have to click around and add a bunch of things too and you're really not going to have an organized way to look at all the data that's going in there and it just becomes a very very complicated spreadsheet and that's not what we want so before we step into the crm or any of our apps it's it's a good thing to plan out your processes before you automate them so that's what we're going to talk about so you don't need your crm you can log out you can close your laptop you can take out the old school piece of paper and pen we're going to do some planning and brainstorming and flow charts so when you uh when you had this idea or awesome product that you want to bring to the market you probably thought this is really cool i wish other people could share this with me or service or product or whatnot and i want to make some money but that's not really the true purpose of business not to make money is to is to get customers and not only get these customers but to keep them because once you have customers they're going to be able to refer more customers to you write really good reviews and you know not write bad things on twitter about you things like that so it's not only to create customers is to keep them and then the money will come right so a sales process what we're going to talk about is to simply create that customer there are other sessions throughout that will focus on help desk which will be on keeping that customer or survey which will also focus on keeping the customer right so that's our focus on these crm sessions all right so this is the true title of this session elements of a sales process all right so sales existed way way back before there was crm um it's a strategy to exchange goods even before there was a monetary piece to it people were still selling something you've sold since you were probably two or three years old when you can start talking because you're selling to your parents the value of the coolest toy at toys r us and once you sell it to them then they go to the store and then someone else will probably upsell them to buy every accessory and you come home happy kid so we've always been doing this so everyone has this skill built in so think of the time when you really wanted something and you had to bother your wife or husband or your parents or your friend to get it for you yeah at that point you were doing some selling right so it's always existed it's a part of us uh we are inclined to sell anything um who here saw like um the new fast and furious movie or the gardens and galaxy movie if i talk to you like oh it's an awesome movie you need to see it tomorrow you're selling to me right now right so it's all it's built into all of us so anyone who says oh i'm not really good at selling well think about all the stuff that you have sold and how successful you were convincing people to do everything that you like to do right all right so in more technical terms at some point you were a lead or a prospect and you became a customer and in your business you are going to gather more leads more prospects and turn them into customers and that's how your business will grow so now let's get a little bit more technical so the lead generation process is broken down into so many different steps so we're going to think about where our leads are coming from how we generate them how do we know they're the right leads what questions should we ask how do we qualify and nurture them and then how do we sell to those people some businesses their marketing departments will focus on lead generation and lead qualification and then the sales will take over to finish the nurturing qualification and then do the actual selling now some of you have a much smaller company and you are both the marketing person and the sales person and the accounting person and the vp and the ceo and the president right and so this may not apply to you exactly but as your company grows you're going to split to different departments and scale and hire specialized people to focus on certain pieces for you so let's start with this generate piece so the reason i wanted people to take out a piece of paper is to kind of get your brain flowing how do you generate leads for your company trade shows are a great way to generate leads it's a little expensive if you're just starting out to go to a trade show but you can always be one of those guys that walks around looking for free pens and then slowly sliding your business card into every single booth then there's also referrals if you have a small business referrals are going to be the key to building the foundation of your business because you delight your customers then they're going to bring more customers to you so we're going to look at all these different examples of lead generation so online or offline so both those examples were offline lead generation online is like social media or google adwords online ads then think about who does it at your company if you are that person if you haven't hired that person if you're looking for that person is it your sales person that's also doing lead generation i've talked to sales people who are also responsible to go on linkedin and find all their leads for themselves and if you work at zoho our marketing department will take care of that and all you have to do is make all the calls so who's doing the lead generation and what role is it considered at your company and it could be mixed there's no black and white you know distinctions between some of this stuff and if you've scaled and grown how has it changed over time so think about you started maybe with a referral based business and now you have enough money to do trade shows and tv ads and google adwords and so and of course email marketing which we all should be doing right so here's some examples of how to generate leads so the first one is your website which is your store the first thing someone sees i'm going to quickly plug in zoho sites here for free you can build your website once you have your website then you are going to generate traffic to that website and you're going to have a forum people can fill it out they'll join the emailing list and then you can send those emails to them traveling to trade shows making cold calls buying lists off the internet using facebook and twitter and all these other social media things to uh to generate leads and of course people can walk into your store if you have actual retail shop so these may be some of the things that you already do or you're thinking about doing but that's the first step in planning your sales process is where are my leads coming from so now you have a bunch of leads you have 10 leads you have a thousand leads you have 5 000 leads what do you do with all this information so before you just put them all into the crm and start working you're going to figure out who is going to get these leads assigned is it going to be my one and only sales person is it going to be my whole sales team is it going to be team split by region or by territory how are they going to be assigned is it round robin is it by state is it um is it by product line so you have to think about that first on how these leads are getting distributed what's important to track so if you have a web form you're getting first name last name maybe an email address maybe the product they're interested in what other information is important to you that is what's going to become your custom fields in those modules and you're going to enter that information and some of that can be mandatory and so the sales rep cannot move on to the next lead until that data has been filled in so that information will become your custom fields but first think about the information you need and then how many times you need to follow up with that lead right you can't just arbitrarily go into your salesperson's cubicle office desk whatever it is and say hey call this lead 100 times so they answer their phone because they're not answering their phone you can't leave 10 voicemails because obviously you're probably going to lose that customer so how many times should you follow up that's a really really hard question so i'll give you an insider tip if you ever signed up for zoho crm and my sales team was assigned to your your account you were going to be called four times during your trial but not at every call when you receive a voicemail so there's ghost calling where you can call four times but only twice you leave the voicemail so it doesn't look like you left four voicemails in two weeks and then on top of it sent like seven emails so you have to figure out what's a sweet spot so that's what we do within two weeks there's four follow-ups some companies do 12 follow-ups statistically you probably need to hit the double digits now to reach someone and that's through every channel from phone social media to texting to uh to email generally it's 10 to 12 times which is pretty crazy but it's because people are always on the go these days so that number used to be around six or seven is bumping up to ten or twelve but as i said we only do four phone calls but we're also hitting six emails so we're still hitting 10 touches throughout the trial so that's something you need to you need to figure out if the lead answers the phone and they don't give you all the information then how many times should you call them after that so you need to you need to figure that out and have it standardized and then how do you know there's a real selling opportunity what is what we call the buying signal i need a quote i need a demo i need a migration those are buying signals that we have for zoho crm so identify those buying signals so that your reps know when to hit the convert button in the crm so we're continually building our flowchart here so i'm going to add the qualify piece so we are assigning our leads to the right people or the right team we're going to decide how many times we're going to follow up and then we're going to figure out and gauge their interest and their intent and identify any buying signals or buying opportunities in an ideal world of course we would have a 100 conversion on all of our leads but we know that's not true so we have to train our reps to ask the right questions and to know what to say if someone's looking at a competitor product or if someone doesn't have enough money do you have a sort of discounting system in place you have to put all that into your training for your for your sales reps in the qualifying nurturing phase once you have the right information you've added your notes you've added some tasks you've filled in all the custom fields then you're going to start the formal sales process and that's when you hit the convert button every single company in this room or every account is going to have a different point when they hit the convert button i've talked to people who hit the convert button right away when they just get the lead information then they convert them and turn into a track sale some people will take the lead through five different sales stages and then convert the lead because it's more complex so you need to figure out when that button needs to be hit and that's going to create your actual sales process in the crm that's what we call the sales stages so you might have different terms in your company you might call leads a prospect you might call contacts clients whatever words you want to use it's it's really up to you because you can rename all the modules but you know traditionally we have leads and then we consider them a sales prospect and then we close the opportunity but feel free to rename and use your own vocabulary it's up to you it's your own company so you can do whatever you want so what is the sales process so first of all it a process is something that is sequential and it can be repeated and in the sales process that that sequence is going to create a customer for you so at any given time that's why you have a crm is you'll have multiple people in multiple stages in your sales cycle that's why you need a crm to be able to track all this information and help automate it so all of those stages when someone says what's in your pipeline you're going to be looking at the sales stages whatever is not closed one or closed loss is your sales pipeline so how do you define the sales process the hard part is deciding how many stages you need right so the simplest stage setup is open or closed if you have a more complex sales cycle and the more complex it is you're going to have more and more stages how many should you have so from all the research i've done they recommend between five to seven stages in your sales cycle for business to business sales five to seven you could have ten i think any more than that it will just get too much too much work and that crm doesn't really become a productivity tool it becomes more of a burden on everybody and that's why no one likes to use it so find your sweet spot of how many stages and you can do you know automation on top of this and start pushing things through stages and automating the tasks automating emails to make everything easier so we want to write down these stages and i'm going to give you a list of so many different stages that you can pick from do not use what the crm includes please do not use that it doesn't apply to anybody at all i've never met anyone in my six years as zoho can actually use that as is so don't use it if you're using it please delete it all right so now that you've deleted all the stages i want you to write down four to six seven eight whatever how many stages you have your sales cycle remember you can refine this over time if you're starting out you might just do a three stage sales cycle maybe in three years once you scale up your company it's going to split into a six stage sales cycle if you're selling multiple products there are more advanced things in the crm you can do and you can have different sales stages for different products using the multi-page layout so if you want to brainstorm or write that down we can go over that in our one-on-ones as well so you're not limited to just one set of stages now another complicated question is what percentages should you assign to those stages now if you look in the crm there are percentages assigned to every single stage the simplest way to do that if you have four stages maybe you should just divide by four and use 25 50 7 500. what does that actually mean so in the forecasting module which is not the most popular module in the crm some of this stuff can be actually taken advantage of to calculate things like expected revenue or you might call it weighted revenue over time when you have months and years of data you'll actually be able to know the percent to close based on the stage if i give someone a quote after two years of looking at my data i know half of those close once you have all those percentages refined over a few years you'd be surprised at how accurate your forecast can be that's why you're actually setting these probabilities but if you're new then you know try to figure out what your best guess is and then refine it over time as long as they go from zero to 100 you're on the right track how do you know if you have the right process you don't right so if it's your company you have to figure that out so the crm unfortunately cannot magically decipher that for you you have to tell it what to do and then it can help you become more productive and automate all those other cool buzzwords right so but you have to figure out your sales cycle and how many stages and all those percentages so that's the challenge that i that i give to you and we are more than happy to help you go through that you can network with people in your industry to kind of figure out the process and of course you can read which not a lot of us do these days but you can still read books they're out there let's look at all these sales stages they're not in order so hopefully you don't don't think they're in order so what i've done is kind of looked at so many different industries and different clients that we've had and come up with all these different stages that you can use notice that most of these are not the ones you get in the crm because those are not the ones you want to use right so you can go above and beyond where it says closed one doesn't mean that that's the end of your sales cycle you might have to then go on and do some implementations you can have sales stages that are still 100 to close after the closed one stage so you can go above and beyond that they they won't appear in your pipeline but they're different closed one stages through your implementation process so pick some stages that work for your business so here's an example so in these set of stages we're going to present the value we're going to address objectives we're going to gauge commitment identify decision makers propose solution negotiate terms and then close so that's a sales cycle the key thing here is to refine it over time so as i said if you're just starting out don't add five six stages it's just gonna make it more of a headache because you're not gonna know how to even train the people on what stage to put and there's going to be a lot of gray area we still experience that in our sales team we have i think 11 to 12 stages at this point there's still gray area should i put them in this one or this one or this one so start simple start with the three or four and then refine it over time as your process gets more and more complex all right so we should be building a flow chart generation qualification and close now you're almost ready to start using your crm because now we can dive in we can fix the lead source field we can decide how many tasks and events need to be put into the crm we can figure out who's going to take notes and when they're going to add them in how many emails are going to send who's going to build the templates how many fields to add and what to put on the stage probability mapping then you have a good start we're going to review this again so this is where we're going to turn this more into kind of a workshop so start writing stuff down and fill in all this criteria so identify your lead sources specify your qualification criteria i need to make sure i know a b and c outline your sales stages and process create it to a flow chart and then in between there figure out what you want to automate because those workflow sessions will come into play and we can start making this stuff more efficient and write it all down all right so again identify all of your lead sources these are so many more other you know lead sources out there i know social media is on there twice it's all good there's a lot of social media all right um specify your qualification criteria remember this is going to translate into custom fields how many notes how many emails how many tasks how many events how many calls and when to hit the convert button and here's the list again this is going to turn into your sales stages all right so we're almost ready to jump into the crm all right there's a few other considerations that are going to be needed when you're using your crm for your sales process you're going to have to figure out everyone's role in the company and if they're involved in the sales process and how they're involved in it and then you can translate that into profiles roles data sharing territories et cetera and the users and permissions section you're going to have to make sure it's repeatable because the next deal will come in and it has to go through the same steps or your reports are going to be a mess you also want it to be repeatable because if you hire the next person they should be able to be able to shadow the other sales reps and learn the same process and most importantly you should be able to predict what's going to happen next and actually start using the forecasting and you will not be using that in the first few months your company but when you have good data you should be able to then forecast how your company is going to grow so let's look at two examples car sales is something i pick says most of us have experienced this at some point right so how does a dealership generate leads the website you walk into the dealership you call you email or you see a promotion in like the newspaper or the internet then um how do they qualify you well once you walk in they your lead your lead right you get distributed based on your walk-in whoever sees you and runs over to you first and then you're going to figure out how much research that person has done ask them all the right questions make sure that all the money and credit information is good and then you start selling so you address all the needs of their car put together a package give them a quote negotiate terms and this could take days and weeks depending on how stubborn you are with the cars i walk out all the time and come back and i've always always been successful doing so then you arrange financing invoice close delivery etc this is something we've all experienced but this is an example of how that could be converted into the crm look at one more example software sales so like our company for example how do we get leads through zoho.com we cold call webinars events like zoholics online ads then we're gonna in software you're looking for requirements and you're gonna confirm that they're actually interested in it based on those requirements that's going to be a good match then you're going to probably do a demo and then identify how many decision makers there are maybe give a trial solution negotiation if you get a good sales rep and then close all right so something two things that we can relate to software sales car sales now take that idea and apply it to your company and you can build your sales process and develop a flow chart so that's it for this presentation i'll leave this up on the screen but take some time few minutes to kind of brainstorm all of this it will help you implement the crm a lot easier all right