In our last post supporting existing small and minority businesses we recommended looking at the fundamentals of your existing business. Today we focus on examining your sales process with some thoughts from our President, Andre Fowlkes. .
Understanding the Sales Cycle
Whether you are in a pandemic or in “normal” times, we must constantly look to become more efficient. Your sales process is a great place to start. We must shorten our sales cycles — the timeline between customer discovery and getting paid by the customer — in order to reduce lost leads and close more deals.
To start, prioritize and rank leads to sort out where your time should be spent. The sales cycle should be easily transferable to a business’s financial revenue assumptions — as in match up to your financials historical and prospective (aka budgeting method). It’s the key to the business model. A sales cycle must be planned and managed, which takes time, reflectio, math, and resources which invariably are usually left out of financial projections.
As you reflect, here are some activities to consider in regards to managing your sales cycle:
- Amount of time needed daily to generate leads and how (marketing/prospecting)
- Amount of time working the leads to increase engagement and interest from clients
- Amount of time working the pipeline of opportunities
- Amount of time managing prospects and learning their behavior
- Amount of time spent gathering data on prospects
- Amount of time analyzing gathered data
- Amount of time spent closing and how
- Amount of time onboarding clients and how
- Amount of time managing the relationship once onboarded
Consider all of these items when outlining estimates on the length of your sales cycle: the amount of leads you should be generating, the amount of active leads you can handle, and your overall capacity. Your business should allot time to work on your sales process based on these estimates.
Pitfalls of an Unorganized Sales Process
Often, there is a lack of flow and cohesion in this process as the tasks are done in silos; someone is marketing, someone is cultivating relationships, someone is analyzing data, etc. An organized sales process gives your business a sense of flow as you have a better assessment of how things are actually going, thus allowing your business to improve more rapidly.
Our Recommendation
We suggest mapping out your sales process in its entirety. Start with how you generate leads and write out every step of the process all the way to where they paid you. Organize what you laid out in order to create a solution that is repeatable and measurable creating flow within your business. Always remember, if you don’t know who your customer is or who your new customer may be, your sales process is flawed.