The Sales Process
You may be using a sales tool to track leads and your business opportunities. Most CRM or customer relationship management tools will assign a lead and give the ability to convert to a sales opportunity. Deals get lost in the lead passing process. A lead is sent to a direct or in direct sales person and just falls away. Most sales people jump the hot lead and stay with it. The lead requiring nurturing and development disappears. This costs the company sales and money is wasted. The second dealer killer is quote or proposal. This step, which should be defined and only done with very qualified prospects, is an island of lost opportunity. Lost because time is eaten up doing and sending the quote and follow up can be indifferent due to lack of visibility. Most CRM or sales tools do not quote pushing the company to use a disparate quote system.
Sales Process Steps
- Lead: Grab the lead, route to sales guy, sales guy follows up.
- Potential: Lead is converted to business opportunity. Sales person is working
- Quotes: Quote is done, usually in quote system invisible to CRM and to business.
- Invoices: Invoice is sent. Accounting system NOT done in most CRM
- Help Desk with Ticket System and FAQ or knowledgebase: Suppport and customer service to retain customers.
To increase sales and retain customers the 5 Sales process steps are connected. Contact and activity management is linked to the sales process. Product and service catalogs are linked to leads and potentials. Reporting is complete in the CRM tool which can do this.
