Use a Common Process

Here's a Mystery.  

Most departments in an organisation have a common language and a common process.

Everyone in Accounting talks the same language.

In Marketing, there's a very analytical process by which everyone agrees to measure results.

In Operations or Engineering, or any other part of the organisation you care to name, everyone agrees on the process by which things get done, and everyone agrees on the key terms that connect to the process.

Yet Sales, for some reason, typically doesn't have a consistent process that managers and salespeople understand and agree to follow.  

In fact, most sales teams, salespeople tend to resist any attempt to establish a consistent process for a team as a whole - and managers tend to let them. Why?

If you don't have a common language within the sales team, you may rationalise your way out of that problem by hiring experienced salespeople who bring their 'best' practices with them. That only masks the problem, though, as everyone on the team brings their own 'best' practices.  Before long, you realise that you are leading a team that has little, or nothing, in common.

Creating a common language and a common process foe every sales professional in the organisation (including you) seems like common-sense.

Yet, most of the sales leaders we talk to have no shared process to use when interacting with salespeople about the most important issues, such as coaching, debriefing, onboarding and sales pipeline management, Mutual mystification and improvisation are the default.

When a salesperson tells you a meeting with a prospect 'went well' do you both agree on what 'went well' actually means?

When a salesperson says that a prospects is "qualified', are you sure you're both using the word 'qualified' to describe the same thing?

When a salesperson tells you that a proposal is 'ready to present', do you both know with absolute certainty that the prospect's answer to the presentation is not going to be a classic "Leave it with me", "Let's think it over' or "We'll be in touch soon'?

Does the salesperson know what the prospect believes the next step in the sales process is?

If you answered, "No", to even one of those questions, chances are you and your team are not on the same page. Sales professionals who follow the Sandler Selling System methodology, by contract, are consistantly on the same page with each other.

Managers and salespeople who follow the Sandler system consistently agree on all this and much more - because the managers have learned to follow the Sandler Rules for Sales Leaders.