In 30 seconds
Sales process mapping is essential for delivering sales strategies and setting quality standards for sales and service teams. Beyond its known benefits, it uncovers valuable insights. For instance, one company’s overly strict credit department rejected many good deals, only revealed through mapping. Another organisation’s convoluted client engagement process led to internal conflicts and client dissatisfaction, causing 50% of new clients to leave within a few months of being onboarded. Such information is invaluable to leadership for transformation. Openness to challenging findings is key. Sales and service processes, being deeply human experiences, require assessment, mapping, alignment with business goals, and team adaptation for better results.
In 2 minutes
Sales process mapping is usually done as a step to deliver the sales strategy and set up minimum standards of excellence within the sales and service team and it’s used for induction, sales training, and coaching. There’s no doubt about the value of having a sales process map.
What is less known is the rich and potentially transformative information that comes out of the work done to design a sales process map.
Here’s a couple of examples of facts that we uncovered while sales process mapping:
- The credit department of a business was so tight on what was deemed to be an acceptable credit-worthy business proposal, that most of the good deals brought in by the sales teams were not accepted. No one had picked this up until we did the sales process mapping work.
- An organisation with a very convoluted client engagement process that involved too many people jumping in on each other’s jobs creating extra work, internal conflict, and a very confusing buying experience for the client, 50% of whom would leave just within months of being onboarded.
Information like this is gold in the hands of the leadership team. So much opportunity to improve and transform, including people in the process with good faith and have a positive outcome.
The key here is that senior management be open to knowing what is really happening, even if it’s hard to listen and challenging.
Sales and Service processes are deeply human experiences and therefore prone to dysfunction if not properly assessed, mapped, and aligned to the strategy and purpose of a business and then rolled out to teams in a way that helps them adapt and adopt better ways of selling and doing business.
Remember, everybody lives by selling something.
Stories from the field
Since our workshop yesterday:
Steph sold 80-100hrs this morning with his customer.
Robert has followed up 3 or 4 leads and booked a number of customer meetings.
I sat in a meeting and did a WWW with a customer, got 3 Fs out. Got another one in 30mins.
And it’s before 11 am.
A little confidence goes a long way eh. I’ll need more delivery capacity…
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