How familiar are you with your own sales process?

Posted December 7, 2022 in
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Allison Riggs

Moving people closer to their goals + dreams each and every day

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Generating and ultimately landing sales is all about understanding your customers- which sounds simple enough until you realize that only 13% of customers believe that salespeople understand and care about their needs. 

WOW! So, what is it that makes people distrust salespeople?

There has to be an underlying issue somewhere - and if I had to guess, there are two major roadblocks standing in the way:

  1. You’ve never been through your own sales process
You work for the company day in and day out, and you live and breathe the sales process- maybe you’ve even created the process yourself. But have you ever walked through it from the customers' point of view? Have you ever sat on the other side of the desk?

Things to consider:

Go to your own website and submit the exact form that you get most of your leads from. What response do you get? How long does it take for it to come through? Pay attention to how it makes you feel- do you feel like you’re being sold to? Do you feel valued? Scrutinize everything.

Then, you should role-play a full sales call with members of your sales team- and by that I mean actually sit down and call your coworker from your office on the phone and walk through the entire exchange. Ask them questions as if you are the buyer, feign ignorance. Truly get into character and try to find any gaps in service. 

This way, you’ll truly begin to understand what your customers experience.

  1. Your whole sales process is about you, not your buyer.

When you’re looking through your website, marketing emails or even your signage around the office - how often do you read the words “we”, “our”, or “us”? Y’all, everyone is guilty of this. It’s human nature to want to say “We are the best company for xyz!” or  “Our motto is…..” - but how might your buyer feel if you focused on their needs and issues instead? 

How to improve it:

The more you listen to your customers (in sales calls, surveys, interviews, etc.), the more you’ll hear them articulate their challenges. You can then use this knowledge to improve your website headlines, email copy, and more by using buyer centric language. “We are the best company for xyz” becomes “Struggling with XYZ? We can help!” 

The more you can put things in your buyer’s words, the easier it is for them to agree with your solution. 

How are you implementing these tactics and what are you finding once you do?

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Chris Rivers
 Allison…great points shared here. 
 
The “go through your own buying process” strategy is clutch! 
 
It’s the ONLY way to truly see a sales or lead generation process from a customer's perspective. 
 
And when that strategy is coupled with your second strategy of role-playing and reviewing sales conversations, it becomes much clearer why prospects and customers see things very differently than “we” see them. 
 
Great insights you shared! 

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