How do you structure a sales process that converts into 4 steps?
The sales process It is the keystone of your commercial development. An effective business process can ensure a rapid and sustainable development of your business; on the other hand, if you neglect it, even a great product or service is doomed to fail.
However, it is one of the least well-worked aspects in companies, we hear more and more about products that “sell by themselves” or that you just need to know how to “close”... I am going to change your mind about what an effective sales cycle is, and present you with a method that changes everything: Q2C selling.
What to remember about the sales process:
- A well-structured sales process in 3 phases (qualification, proposal, closing) is the keystone of commercial development and a powerful driver of differentiation from the competition.
- La Q2C selling method allows you to personalize and optimize your commercial process according to your products/services and the profile of your prospects.
- Commercial conversations, stories and adapted content transform your sales process into a real value-added experience for your potential customers.
- Beyond techniques, corporate culture and the support of your sales representatives have more impact on your success than simple management by variables and objectives.
Commercial process: what are the stages of the sale?
The stages of the sale: definition of a sales process.
The sales process is in fact all the steps of sales cycle Since the commercial prospecting until the contract is signed. You can even include after-sales and loyalty. So it is, in fact, the core of value generation for the company.
What are the 3 phases of a sales process?
Its objective is simple, to identify if the prospects are good potential customers. But also, are we the right company to solve their problem. We can also talk about the discovery phase.
If an opportunity is qualified, we move on to the second phase of the process, convincing! In this phase, the challenge is to succeed in showing that we are the ideal partner, supplier, seller to respond to the problems of potential customers.
It's obvious, the objective is to sign the sale, to reach the conclusion of the sale! In principle yes, but it is also and above all closing the sales process. Of course we all dream of 100% success, but that will never happen, and many businesses have the unfortunate tendency to consider sales processes “in progress” for months because the customer is “thinking”. We avoid denial, we “close”, whether it is a victory or a failure.
The existence of differences between B2B and B2C sales
Attention, these are three main phases of the process, they do not always correspond to the same number of contacts depending on your activity. In certain sectors of activity, especially in B2C, we can have very short sales cycles where these three stages of the sale occur during a single contact.
B2B sales processes, on the other hand, are often much longer and there can be a large number of different contacts in each of these phases.
In all cases, the challenge is not to try to imagine a sales process that would be perfect at all times and for all businesses. It does not exist, it is impossible and believing it will take you right into the wall.
Structuring your sales process well, a decisive competitive advantage
You will differentiate yourself from the competition thanks to your sales cycle
Competition is everywhere, digital technology has considerably reduced barriers to entry in many sectors and your prospects are assailed from all sides by you and your competitors. The sales process is an integral part ofexperience that you offer to your customers. If it brings value and is controlled, it actually becomes a solid differentiator.
It is also a guarantee of seriousness, if your cycle is clear and rhythmic you will advance much faster than your competitors with your prospects who will have a demonstration of your effectiveness.
Train your salespeople and ensure healthier transitions
With a clear sales process enriched by the experience of your teams, it becomes much easier to train new salespeople. Moreover, a good sales process is much more decisive for the success of a salesperson than the supposed talent of the salesperson.
That doesn't detract from talent, of course. But don't waste your teams' talent by having them make up for the shortcomings of your business strategy. Give them the tools, a road map to be as effective as possible.
Why not use existing sales techniques to enrich each stage of the sale?
You're right, there are lots of sales techniques, some of which will help structure your sales process. They more or less all claim to be an almost universal framework for creating an effective and good sales process. stats.
They are very widespread and for example:
- Procter & Gamble swears by SIMAC
- Xerox by SPANCO
- IBM through SPIN selling
- Sales Odyssey through Q2C selling
The problem with these techniques is that in fact they often simply divide the sales process into more or less precise phases that always end up being synthesized by the 3 stages of the sale that I presented to you above. It doesn't matter if you cut them into 3, 5, 11, 11, or 89 pieces.
The problem for sales teams and their management is not knowing in which column of the CRM You have to move a deal. Their problem is how they will be able to identify the right opportunities and how they will be able to make them progress from the stadium: “I have a problem” to “you are my solution”.
There is no magic recipe, no unstoppable framework that works every time, no 5-legged sheep so brilliant that it will sign every deal you give it (besides, are you really sure you are in a position to feed it to your 5-legged sheep?).
What you need is to take a step back from YOUR sales process, understand the decision-making process of your prospects and provide your teams with the necessary tools. No sales technique, at least to date, offers you a method to achieve this.
Then come the sales techniques that will help you be more effective at each stage of YOUR sales process.
In particular, we find:
✅ The Spin Selling which for qualification is extremely structuring.
✅ THE BEBEDC for the qualification as well.
✅ SONCAS, DISC, or CAB to be more effective when presenting your arguments
✅ MEDDIC, to make sure we have the right information to move forward.
How to structure your sales management process using Q2C selling
What is Q2C selling?
The Q2C Selling is a new sales method that will focus on the structuring of the sales process AND the levers to be used to become more effective at each stage of the sale.
This method, we are not going to hide it, it is our baby, to us Sales Odyssey and to themarketing agency 1m30. It was created by Gabriel Daby Schwebel and myself (editor's note: Nicolas Delignieres) and is enriched by the expertise of numerous sales experts.
Q2C selling is:
- A method to build and enrich YOUR sales process
- High-performance tools to succeed in selling better through conversations, stories and content.
- Keys to managing and leading your sales team, training them and rethinking their motivation levers.
Q2C selling is therefore very broad and here we will focus on its contribution in terms of structuring the sales process with the core of the 4-step method.
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Step 1: the Canva sales process to challenge your sales process
The first step in the method of structuring its commercial process It's about asking yourself the right questions to identify and formalize the keys to the success of your sales cycles.
The sales cycle is therefore divided into its three main stages and each stage will be challenged with regard to two main questions: “What?” and “Who?”
The qualification
The “what” : The objective is to understand which are the right projects/the right products for your business. Here we find many questions to ask yourself about the most profitable projects and products, those that will appeal to your team, those on which you are the most efficient, etc.
The “who” : You have to ask yourself the key questions, go beyond the obvious question “does this prospect correspond to my target customers?” We wonder about who are the good and the bad customers, those who sign quickly or not, those with whom things go well or not. Since selling is quite far from a rational experience, we must question the who as well as the what.
The reformulation : Complete the following sentence “An opportunity is qualified when...” The ability to simply summarize what a qualified opportunity is ensures that the rules are clear and that they will be easy to pass on and easy to follow.
The value proposition
The “what”: What convinces our prospects?
This may seem trivial but many companies structure their value proposition by copying what they think are the standards of the market in which they operate. This is why 9 out of 10 SaaS companies spend 10 minutes at the beginning of the presentation showing us nice logos of their prestigious client and fundraising figures. Honestly, who does that convince?
Ask yourself the right questions and only present what will convince them at the right time.
The “who”: Who to convince and who convinces them?
Again, this is a broad question, and most purchasing processes today involve several decision makers. If you don't take each of these people into account, you greatly increase the risk of failure.
While this may seem obvious, the second part of the question is often much less obvious.
Who on my team is best able to convince this person? Selling is a team sport, if your prospect needs to be reassured by your CTO it is your duty as a salesperson to make this happen.
The reformulation: My value proposition is complete when...
The idea here is simply to identify the key elements that you want to have presented to your prospects in 100% of the cases. Until this is done the value proposition is not over. Don't list 1000 items, just list the essentials. A successful value proposition doesn't have to be long or comprehensive.
The Closing
The “what”: What can keep you from closing? How can we overcome this obstacle?
Well yes, once the value proposition is made you only expect a response. Yes, or no. If the closing is dragging on, what could be the cause? Identify these causes and prepare a way to trigger decision-making. The worst that can happen to you is not to fail, it is to wait for a decision that will never come.
The “who”: Who can make the sale fail?
And yes sometimes what gets stuck is not the “what” but the “who”, try to anticipate the presence of people who would hinder the sale and initiate a meeting. Alleviate their fear or you will never succeed in selling!
Feedback: Understanding the reason for a closing
This is probably the most important aspect of the closing, but perhaps also the most important part of your commercial performance future. Winning or losing a sale is not the key to your future success, it is the result of your past performance.
Do you want your business to grow and become better? So what matters is knowing why you won or lost, it is this element that will allow you to become better.
Step 2: The go/no-go tree, to define the rules for progressing in the sales cycle
In Q2C selling we start from the principle that a good sale must be a profitable sale. What does that mean?
This means that we must constantly size our effort to the hope of gain.
It is useless to continue a process that is doomed to failure, it is useless to offer the same sales process for a €1000 opportunity as for a €100,000 opportunity.
You might say to me, “But it's obvious.”
So now I ask you to explain to me exactly what are the rules and criteria that will allow you to determine whether or not to move forward, and if so how do you move forward?
There is usually no one left. That's where the Q2C selling Go/No Go tree comes in. You will determine the rules for continuing a sales process and the different branches of this decision tree.
Building your go/no go tree
We start by defining the criteria that allow the sales process to move forward and for each criterion we formulate it in the following way:
Then we model the complete tree:
This is an essential step in facilitating decision-making on sales processes and it is even more important for the most recent salespeople who have joined your teams. They have not yet been able to build a good “instinct” on your prospects specifically and are therefore much more likely to fall into overenthusiasm.
Remember that a time-consuming sales process is costing you a fortune. Sometimes more than you'll get from the sale.
Step 3: Enrich each stage of the sales process
Enriching the sales process is what will make you go from being a transactional intermediary between potential customers and your products/services to that of an advisor, an expert with prospects. Needless to tell you that it will greatly improve your conversion rate AND the Sales amount.
The objective of this stage is both to transform your sales process so that it becomes a real experience for your customer, an experience that actually improves your value proposition. But it's also a great way to stay in control of what's going on without you.
And yes, today more than two-thirds of the sales process takes place online and between decision-makers without the intervention of the salesperson. However, that doesn't mean you can't influence what happens during this phase.
With Q2C selling, we offer you 5 elements to enrich your sales process:
It's the backbone of your sales process. They allow you to create a rich exchange with your prospect and to help you progress towards the closing in a fluid manner. Well used, they allow you to retrieve any information, to bring out commercial objections while naturally bringing up your arguments.
They are essential to manage the asynchronism of current sales cycles, which will facilitate the work of your interlocutors to promote your solution to secondary decision-makers. You will also guide the additional research of your prospects to your advantage. Attention, this is where the right alignment with marketing teams is the most critical.
For decades, we've been working hard to imagine sales methods based on acronyms to be more effective when presenting a point. But the mystery was solved thousands of years ago. Stories are the most effective way to convey messages. Don't present a pitch, tell a story!
Everyone generally knows the tasks of a salesperson but never hesitate to get a prospect to work. Not only can this be essential for the correct sizing of your value proposition, but it also contributes to a well-known bias, the escalation of commitment. The more a prospect is involved in the process, the higher the chances of closing.
Adapt the methods of the sales interview, the validation of the criteria of your go/no go tree and the people present at each stage of the sale according to your prospect and your objectives. We have never had so many possibilities: telephone, video, face to face, e-mail, everything is possible!
Step 4: Prioritize improvement actions for each stage of the sale.
Of course, at the end of this work, regardless of the maturity level of your business, you will notice that there are “holes in the racket”. We will therefore have to work hard to fill them, it is a never-ending job, perfection is not a “state” but a “process”.
To prioritize, we can distinguish two scenarios:
First iteration of Q2C selling : Maximize impact by prioritizing processes that are already well equipped, or processes for selling the most profitable products and services for the company.
Continuous improvement of Q2C selling : Here the idea is to nourish yourself with the causes of success or failure of each sales process in order to enrich the following ones to maximize your chances of success.
Resources to enrich and accelerate your sales process
Conversations to conduct your sales interviews
There are 14 conversations in Q2C selling, these 14 conversations are the backbone of your sales process and allow you to manage it effectively. The idea is really to use these conversations to initiate an exchange that will allow you to get the right information and deliver the right messages at every stage of the sales cycle.
The qualifying conversations
Their purpose is to ensure that the prospect is a good prospect for your business and that you are the right company to solve this prospect's problem. This is the best phase of conversation and for good reason, it is undoubtedly the one to which you should devote the most time.
Value proposition conversations
The objective of value proposition conversations is to ensure that you have convinced your prospect that you are in a position to respond effectively to their problem.
Conversations about the closing
Closing conversations are meant to allow you to trigger decision-making as quickly as possible. Whatever the outcome of the closing, the idea is also to learn from each sales process. It is the key to the long-term business performance of your business.
Content: changing your commercial approach
To simplify, there are 4 main content families to enrich your sales process.
Educational content
This is the content traditionally attributed to marketing. It is a mistake, content that is of a nature to inform and educate your prospects are very important to your success. You need to have enough content to allow someone who doesn't know anything about the problem you're solving to not only understand their problem but also what the levers are for solving it.
Collaborative content
It's content that doesn't exist prior to the sales process, at least not completely. This is content that you will build and share with your prospect throughout your sales process. His role goes well beyond simply witnessing the progress of the sales process. The more you involve your prospect, the more the sales process becomes theirs and therefore if the process is not successful it is also a failure for them. Who wants to fail?
Conversion content
It is content created specifically in order to convince a prospect on a specific aspect. It must be finely personalized, its role must be to allow you to sign. This hyperpersonalized content must be created by the salesperson who followed the sales process from start to finish and cannot be transposed identically to other customers. If not, you can be sure that it won't be personalized enough.
Sales support content
It is content created specifically in order to facilitate the work of the salesperson. The idea is of course to make it more effective by allowing it to more easily focus on exchanges with its customer and not on paperwork, reporting or the design of a commercial offer template.
Stories for more impact in sales
“Storytelling is a marketing thing”, well, at the risk of surprising you, it's wrong. Stories have been the preferred medium for exchanges between humans for thousands of years. If they are capable of crossing the centuries, I can assure you that it is because they have characteristics that will allow them to transmit the message very effectively, to simplify its transmission and memory.
The Storytelling So it's not just a copywriting tool, it's a tool for selling!
Improving commercial management: beyond the sales process
Managing the sales team is not just a CRM business.
Managing your sales team is not simply updating a sales dashboard and completing your customer relationship management (CRM) software. If you want to turn more leads into customers, you need to support your salespeople. Help them make progress, put in place an action plan to improve your sales process, create the conditions for collaboration. Competing with competitors is good, within the same team it should not be abused.
The remuneration of salespeople: the omnipresence of the variable
I was a commercial myself, and I was able to enjoy the benefits of the variable. But I also noticed the numerous excesses associated with this model. We are gradually training mercenaries, if our only action to motivate salespeople is the variable, we can't be surprised that they always go to the highest bidder.
Moreover, encouraging salespeople to sign up unfortunately often means “motivating” them on elements that are not entirely in their hands. Indeed, a salesperson is in control of the quality of his sales process, his strategy and his speed of execution but he is not the one who signs. And the vision is very short-term, if the key is the signature, we forget that the company needs profitability. Profitability and turnover are two different things.
Also, be careful, very high variable remuneration is in fact a huge trap for commercial negotiations. Indeed, a salesperson who wants his bonus will be widely tempted to negotiate, even beyond reason in order to achieve the objectives. You can't negotiate well if you want to sell more than the prospect wants to buy.
But the most annoying thing in the end is that the variable tends to replace coaching. It is as if, under the pretext that the variable exists, sales managers or managers believe that they do not need to do anything more to support the sales team.
Selling is a top-level sport and just because there is a carrot doesn't mean you should neglect the collaboration and coaching of your teams.
Company culture impacts sales efficiency at each stage of sales.
Management through fear and fear is not management. So yes, I know it is a point of view that is not shared by all. But salespeople are the first link between you and your customers, if you treat them badly frankly do you think they will treat your customers how? If you push them to sell at all costs, what do you think it will bring to your business?
Whether you like it or not, this kind of “management” is above all an admission of powerlessness because a sales team that is well supported and coached by exemplary management that focuses on the long term will always bring better results.
This does not mean that your goals should not be ambitious and respected, but remember to be as intractable with the resources you offer your team as with the goals you set for them. Demand digital marketing that is up to the challenge. Be a coach, a leader, not a foreman.
A serene sales team will be more efficient economically than a stressed team with a dizzying turnover.
