Consistently hitting your sales goals can sometimes feel like a game of darts – you’re trying to hit the target and close every deal, but it can be easy to miss the mark. If reps are misaligned on even just one step in the sales process, it can become nearly impossible to drive predictability within your sales force.
The sales process consists of various stages – and each is crucial to the success of the deal. Many sales teams struggle with ensuring their reps land the right behaviors in each stage, as one out of five organizations are focused on streamlining their sales process as a key initiative this year. When sellers can effectively navigate each step in the process, they can continue to move deals forward.
So, how can you optimize your sales process to improve consistent execution? Here are tips to ensure your customer-facing teams are aligned on a standardized process to perform – so you can increase consistency in reps’ abilities to hit their targets.
Weave Your Methodology Into the Sales Process
Sellers are often resistant to change, so driving adoption of your sales process can be a difficult task. To gain buy-in of new behaviors, infuse your sales methodology material into each stage of the process and surface it within rep workflows. With methodology content integrated within your enablement platform and surfacing at key moments from your CRM, you can create a seamless experience for reps and reduce resistance to adoption.
TIP: Align your methodology to your sales process and integrate it within your enablement platform. By infusing methodology resources and behaviors where reps work, you can increase sales process alignment and more consistently shape rep behavior. Customers who deploy their methodology within Highspot through a Marketplace app experience a 57% increase in Sales Play adoption and a 26% increase in active learners in their sales training.
Drive Execution of Sales Behaviors At Each Stage
Achieving standardized execution of the right behaviors requires standardized enablement. To help your sellers feel equipped to approach each phase of the sales process, create training that dives into the key skills to land in each stage – from needs assessment and product demos to objection handling and negotiation. To make the learning more tangible, arm sellers with contextual guidance to navigate each stage with different types of buyers. Through initial training and continuous guidance throughout the process, you can help sellers feel more equipped to succeed and drive the desired behavior change.
TIP: Leverage Sales Plays to help sellers understand what to know, say, show, and do throughout the sales process and ease the handoff between reps. By providing contextual guidance, you can more easily standardize sales performance – as customers who use Plays report a 12% increase in win rate on average.
Eliminate Inconsistency in Real-world Interactions
Without sitting in every meeting, it’s difficult to identify the breakdowns in the sales process. By assessing real-world conversations, you can pinpoint inconsistencies in rep performance and how they impact deals. These insights enable you to coach sellers on the right behaviors to demonstrate in each stage and point back to meetings where reps successfully landed those skills. By providing sellers with real-world examples of what good looks like, you can reduce inconsistencies in your sales process.
TIP: Review reps’ meeting recordings to gain clear visibility into their behaviors in buyer conversations. This will help you understand where each rep is excelling and where there are gaps to close – which you can then work to eliminate through ongoing coaching. When organizations analyze sales conversations and deliver coaching feedback, they’re 46% more likely to increase rep quota attainment.
Optimize Your Sales Process and Hit Your Targets
You need your reps to consistently hit their quota. To do so, they need to close more deals. Standardizing sales execution at every stage of the sales process enables you to unlock consistent performance. By training reps on key competencies, providing guidance to reinforce those behaviors, and eliminating inconsistencies in buyer conversations, you can achieve a streamlined sales process – and ensure every rep hits their mark.
To learn how to standardize execution at every stage of the sales process, download our e-book: The Science Behind a Predictable Sales Process
This blog post is part of Highspot’s research-backed blog series, Highspot Insights. With the help of our research teams, we provide data-driven best practices for sales enablement. If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
