Best Practices in Sales Process Automation

As I explained in the last post, automating your sales process can be one of the most effective ways to guarantee an accurate sales forecast, but the process can be tricky. If you don't do it right, the whole process can backfire on you. Here's Director of Services, Doug Lantz's keys to success as explained at the Midwest SalesLogix User Group meeting.

1.) Design your Sales Processes Outside of the CRM System

Automating your sales processes is a perfect opportunity to sit down and think about how you sell and really get it right. Sure the system will provide some guidance, but every company is unique and you shouldn't let software dictate what you know best.

Find your star sales people and really learn what the right approach is. Is it a standard process and can it be applied throughout the company? Nailing success outside of CRM is the first step in making it successful within the system.

2.) Include All the ways Sales Enter the Pipeline

Do all your leads come from the same source? Ever get customers that just call and ask for a quote instead of having to write up several proposals? Sales can come from many different sources and you'll need to account for that in the sales process you build.

The solution can be as easy as designing a sales process for a new customer and an existing one, or for a large sale versus a small one. Multiple sales processes can handle these different sales situations, though be careful of creating too many and confusing your staff. Even if you choose to do multiple sales processes you'll also want to keep them appropriately broad so that you can catch someone wherever they are in the buying process.

3.) Make the Process Beneficial to Users

If you're using CRM you already know that your sales staff isn't in love with entering data into a CRM system. Making the sales process a tool rather than a simple data collector fixes that problem.

Automatically generate a quote, provide pricing, offer possible rebuttals to closing objections. There are a number of tools that could help close a deal. Include these within the CRM sales process and you should have good buy in.

4.) Keep the Process Linear

SalesLogix and most other CRM systems I've seen use a series of stages and steps to walk a user through the sales process. Very few allow for branching decision trees. Make sure that your process works in a linear fashion so a sales person can easily go forward step by step. You may need to broaden the definition for stage completion to fit these branch decisions. And if you think that simplifying your sales processes is a bad thing see #5.

5.) Make the Process as Simple as Possible

The most important key to success of all five. It's one thing to provide the tools, it's quite another to make them easy to use. Build your sales processes as lean and quick to complete for the best adoption.

Automated sales processes should be three to six stages to be completed with no more than three steps within each stage. Keep it simple and your sales team won't mind providing the data. They'll get the tools they need and you'll get your accurate forecast.

Comments

[Process Automation]

Excellent article. Thanks

[Adam]

Great piece! You nailed it.

-Adam