2. Chart Your Course and Improve Your Sales
A thorough understanding of your total sales process is key to improving your results.
It’s surprising that many companies don’t completely understand how their sales process
really works. Sure, most have procedures and standards, but there is real money to be made
by getting behind the paper and developing a clear step-by-step understanding of how your
organization really goes about finding, closing, and keeping customers.
Most General Managers have little trouble accepting the idea that manufacturing and service
delivery processes can be mapped or charted. They routinely use charts to understand
process flow, throughput, and costing. In fact, charts and process maps have become a way
of life in excellence driven manufacturing businesses striving for continuous improvement.
What many of these same managers miss is the potential benefit to be gained by analyzing
their sales process the very same way. Every sales process can be charted and reduced on
paper to a succession of individual well-defined steps just like a well-ordered manufacturing
process. No matter if it’s the simplest retail interaction or the most complex long-term
business-to-business sale, charting your sales process will give you valuable insights.
Every sales process, no matter how successful, can be improved, and the first step in
generating improvement is gaining a thorough understanding of how things work today.
Some sales people resist this kind of detailed analysis and hide behind the claim that the
interpersonal aspects of selling defy dissection. But dissection on a grand scale is what you
need to do if you want to improve your results.
Before thinking about what to change you first have to thoroughly understand what you are
doing today- your “as is” process. Reducing your sales process to a clear, charted flow
pulled together in a single document makes it easy for you to understand how your sales
engine is working.
Charting today’s sales process uncovers non value added activities that don’t advance the
sale and missing elements that can hurt your batting average. Once your current sales
process is understood, you can develop ways to improve it, incorporate those things that
work well for individual team members, and apply an optimized, uniform process across your
entire sales organization.
It’s usually best to break this kind of project into two parts. The first part maps the “as is”
process and the second develops a vision for an improved “go to” process.
In most circumstances, the best way to map your “as is” sale process is to attack the problem
as a team. If you can, gather your sales team together in one place for the discussion. In
most businesses it makes sense to also include those people who support the sales effort as
well. Try to keep the size of the group manageable. If it gets too large it will be difficult to do
productive fact-finding. In most cases the best way to run the discussion is to record inputs
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3. on a flip chart and hang each page up on the wall as it is filled out. I prefer this “low tech”
approach because it allows group participation as the sales team maps the selling process
themselves.
Start at the beginning of the process for your business. For many businesses this first step is
lead generation or target account identification. Talk your way through the sale with your
team by asking questions and record every step of the process right to the close of the sale.
Join each step on the chart to the one that follows it. Be sure you account for all possible
outcomes at each step. Show setbacks as loops which either return you to some earlier point
in the process to try again or lead to a decision to stop the effort.
Encourage disagreements and note them off to one side separately. Don’t fall into the trap of
recording ideas about how things should be at this point since this can derail the discussion.
Have people write their ideas down privately to be brought to the discussion later. Don’t get
distracted at this point talking about improvements. The first objective is to produce as
accurate a representation of your “as is” process as you can including all of its faults and
disconnects. Finally, don’t miss the opportunity to understand your after sale activities as
well. Incorporate these into your chart.
Don’t be surprised if there isn’t general agreement among your own team on how things are
done. Hidden in these differences and apparent disconnects between team members are
your businesses’ own set of best practices and some opportunities to eliminate unproductive
effort. Make sure that everything you and your team are currently doing finds its way into the
chart. Buried in the details will be a surprising number of non value added activities that don’t
advance the sale. If you move too fast through charting the “as is” and these will be missed.
If people are doing things differently, record the differences in the chart so they can be
evaluated later with an eye to picking the best practice. Pay particular attention to differences
between your best performers and the rest of the team. Listen, record and then listen some
more. Doing this right it is well worth the time, expense and frustration of developing a clear
understanding.
Once you have the whole sales process charted go back to the beginning and assign time
values to the steps. This will give you a picture of how your resources are being spent.
Now have a look at the chart you have developed and do a logic check. Is there general
agreement among the team that the chart reflects the “as is”? Test your findings by running a
typical case against the charted process. Pick a current customer sales effort and overlay it
on the chart. Do they match? If they don’t agree, adjust the chart to match reality. Once you
think you’ve got it all down correctly you can move on to thinking about improvement and
planning for your payback on all this effort.
Take a critical look at the chart with your team. Questions will help you refine your
understanding of the “as is” and help you begin to form a vision of what your “go to” sales
process should look like. In general, your questions should help you decide if you believe
your process is complete, focused, economical, and results oriented. The discussion will
turn up a list of potential improvements and further clarify disconnects.
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4. The right questions to ask will depend on your business. You should come up with a detailed
list of your own, but here are some generic themes that should be covered in every
discussion:
• Is the “as is” chart comprehensive or are there holes which can account for lost
sales?
• Does the process as charted make sense?
• Is there duplicated effort?
• Is everyone’s role clear?
• Does the “as is” process incorporate all of the elements you think are
important?
• Does it reflect your organization’s sales strategy and accepted sales practice?
• Which activities contribute directly to the sale?
• Which activities are important but contribute indirectly?
• Which activities aren’t valued by the customer and don’t contribute to the sale?
• How are you spending your time as an organization?
• Is the effort properly supported at critical times in the sale?
• Where is measurement/control required and how will you do it?
Be critical. Every step in your “as is” sales process peals a dollar bill off the bottom of your
shoes. Ask your team:
• Are all the steps worth it?
• Are you spending time on those activities that most directly affect the sale, or are
you investing too much time in unproductive activities?
• What happens if you eliminate activities that don’t advance the sale or
completely eliminate effort that doesn’t add customer value?
• How are you measuring/controlling/managing the key elements of the process?
Talk these issues through with your team and begin to develop suggestions for the way
things should be. Make a list of your team’s suggestions and inputs.
After you discuss your questions and have your list of improvement suggestions developed,
you are ready to create a “go to” sales process, or a vision of how things should be. Decide
which suggestions should be incorporated in a revised map that will define the “go to” sales
process.
• Remember the differences between your top performers and the rest of the
sales team? Consider incorporating the best practices suggested by your
top performers into the revised map.
• Delete unnecessary steps.
• Add in missing actions important to the sale.
• Weed out the time wasters and decide how you want the available time
allocated among the selling activities.
• Institute measurements where they are needed. .
• Eliminate measurements that aren’t advancing the sale.
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5. Now remap the process incorporating the potential improvements, and run a test case using
an existing project to see if it all fits together. Run a second case choosing a key piece of lost
business and determine if the new process might have changed the outcome. Step back and
ask yourself if what you have envisioned is really better or just different. If it's not better loop
back, you’ve missed something of value that can be improved.
Every business process -- including every type of sales activity -- can benefit from being well
understood. In the end there is no magic way to improve your company's sales activity. It
takes a combination of productive behaviors such as those described in any number of books
on selling and a logical, well-defined series of economical well-focused steps adopted
uniformly throughout the entire sales organization to successfully advance the sales process.
Understand your current process, improve it, institute measurements, and manage to the new
process. Then watch your results improve!
About the Author:
Tim Brown is the Managing Partner of Brevis Consulting; a firm that helps mid-
sized companies improve their results. In his thirty years of senior level
management experience he has led organizations in North America, Asia and
Europe as General Manager, Senior VP of Marketing and Sales, National
Marketing Manager, Business Unit Manager and Product Manager in several
successful global mid-sized businesses. He can be reached by calling +1 (508)
758-2441 or sending e-mail to tbrown@brevisconsult.com .
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