Consistency in sales processes for small businesses means that every member of your sales team is on the same page, taking the same actions to accomplish shared goals.
When your sales team uses repeatable steps to convert a prospect into a customer, you can set clear targets, measure progress, develop a clear sense of what a good process looks like, and hold individual team members accountable for their performance and growth. But how do you get to where you want to be sales-wise and stay there?
Read on to learn more about how to improve consistency in sales processes to produce greater results.
Why Is Consistency in Sales Processes Important for Small Businesses?
As a small business owner, ensuring consistency in your sales processes is crucial for meeting your goals. Sticking to a set sales routine allows you to save time and effort, resulting in spending less time improving processes and devoting more time to closing sales. Developing and maintaining a standardized sales process also adds structure to your sales activities and leads to a higher win rate and shorter sales cycles, getting you one step closer to meeting your goals.
Tips for Creating and Maintaining Consistent, Effective Sales Processes
Below are some tips for developing and maintaining consistency in your sales processes:
Identify Your Ideal Customer
To create consistency in your sales processes, first, learn more about your ideal customer, identifying specifics about their behaviors, characteristics, and demographics. Take a look at your most valuable customers, asking yourself:
- Where do my best customers live?
- What’s their lifestyle, age, and gender?
- What products or services do my ideal customers buy?
- Why are my best customers purchasing this product or service?
- When is this product or service typically bought?
After answering these questions, write a summary paragraph describing your target market.
Break Down Your Sales Goals
Next, it’s time to break down your sales goals. To achieve your overall sales goals, it’s important to break them down into small steps to make them easier to manage, track, and achieve.
The way you break down your sales goal depends on your business. For example, you might break down your sales goal by sales per product, per service type, or customer type. For some businesses, it makes sense to break down sales goals by geography or salesperson.
No matter how you break down your sales goals, the activities performed to achieve each one will be different, so you’ll want to break down each goal separately.
Make a Sales Revenue Plan
Once you’ve identified your target market and set goals, make a sales revenue plan, or in other words, a sales plan for your small business. Creating a sales revenue plan for your business quickly allows you to:
- Identify your target market
- Create a solution for finding your target market consistently
- Determine your revenue growth targets
- Discover how your revenue targets fit with your overall business goals
Your sales plan should include two things: 1) the results you want to achieve, i.e. your sales goal, and 2) the activities needed to accomplish them. Typical activity goals include sending and responding to emails and texts, taking initial sales calls and following up, providing quotes, and scheduling appointments. Your activity goals will be unique to your business and individual team members. Some examples include:
- Salesperson A: Push for the “yes” or the “no” calls when it’s appropriate.
- Salesperson B: Ask at least three needs-based questions before discussing features and benefits.
- Salesperson C: Ensure 25% of sales are repeat business.
Track and Monitor
Reviewing and adjusting your activity numbers regularly helps lead to your desired sales results and improves consistency in sales and processes. Eventually, you’ll come to know and refine how many cold calls result in one appointment or how many appointments result in one closed sale, for example. With this historical data, you become more confident in the targets you set for your sales team. Make sure to track and monitor these numbers on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis.
Create Distinct Positions
Another way to improve consistency in your sales processes is to develop distinct positions for your team. Developing specific sales positions, such as a lead generator, meeting coordinator, closer, and account manager, can help produce more consistent outcomes. Creating distinct positions on your sales team also allows you to assign priorities and responsibilities to individuals, making it easier to measure performance and growth.
Develop Standardized Messaging
It’s difficult to implement consistency in your sales processes if all your reps are pitching your products and services differently. To get everyone on the same page, develop a standard message or scripts that convey your brand’s reputation, products, and services powerfully and accurately.
Consider Coaching for Your Sales Team
Lastly, consider coaching for your sales team. Partnering with an experienced business coach that specializes in creating consistency in sales processes can help your team members overcome challenges unique to sales, such as closing deals, prospecting good leads, and overcoming price objections.
As a business owner, your company goals may get a lot of attention—but what about your personal goals?
Creating Consistency in Sales for Small Businesses With Sales Coaching and Training
At Inspire Results Business Coaching, we help small to medium-sized businesses create consistency in sales with coaching and training. Expert sales skills and sales management is one of our specialties. We believe in needs-based sales—that’s why we customize our sales coaching and training content to meet your unique needs. Whether you have one sales person or an entire team, we can create a unique sales coaching solution that’s just for you. From planning and execution and sales activity management to developing one-on-one selling skills, we can help you take your sales to the next level. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help create consistency in your sales processes.
