Categories: Sales Qualification | Scaling Sales
Part of the beauty of a revenue-driving sales process is its simplicity. Can your portfolio company leaders explain their sales process to you simply? Help your partners ensure their sales process provides the rigor and support that sales teams need to accurately predict their numbers.
Sales organizations that drive business predictability have a sales process that’s simple enough to ensure everyone knows who does what when, and is accountable for the result. An effective sales process provides a vehicle for the entire sales organization to enforce discipline, repeatability and validation of progress — as deals move through the pipeline. You can support your portfolio company leaders in assessing their sales process for this type of rigor. Help your partners build their sales process by exploring these five key components of a great sales process.
1. How aligned is their sales process with their customer's buying process?
Top-performing portfolio companies likely have a revenue-driving sales process that’s driven by their buyer. In these organizations, sellers stay in sync with the way their customers want to buy. As a result, salespeople aren’t getting stuck in deals they don’t belong in, leadership can see where deals truly stand on any given day, and business predictability is easier to maintain.
Here are a few questions that may help your portfolio company partners assess for buyer alignment in their sales process:
- Is the sales team provided with buyer-centric content, activities, and tools they can leverage to ensure synchronicity as they qualify and progress their deals?
- Are there specified customer verifiable outcomes that sellers can use to indicate whether the buyer is moving forward in their buying process, or are sellers left to their own judgment?
- Are salespeople driven by the actions their customers take along their buying process or are they moving deals forward with clear gaps in customer knowledge?
- Is the sales team qualifying opportunities in and out based on buyer indicators, or are they getting stuck in deals they don’t belong in?
- Are managers equipped to support reps in dissecting deals to ensure consistent execution and qualification, or are unqualified deals present in the pipeline?
- Is there a firm understanding of how customers purchase solutions? If not, is developing this understanding a top priority for sales leadership?
2. What customer verifiable outcomes progress a deal?
Is there clarity around what customer verifiable outcomes (CVOs), by sales stage, define when a deal should move forward?
Customer verifiable outcomes build qualification into the sales process and allow sellers to qualify opportunities based on what the customer is doing at a particular buying stage. When the entire customer-facing organization has agreement on specific customer verifiable outcomes, everyone understands what buyer actions and decisions need to be captured during the sales process as they progress and qualify opportunities. Clarity around CVOs can significantly improve a salesperson’s ability to qualify the highest-value opportunities and avoid wasting time in deals they don’t belong in. When companies have a common language around CVOs and how they impact the sales process, they can drive significant improvements to forecast accuracy and pipeline health.
As companies mature, and new people hold sales leadership positions, a consistent agreement on customer verifiable outcomes can shift. You likely see this misalignment when scaling portfolio companies. It typically manifests as an inability to predict the business. We’ve seen similar trends. Through our Command of the Sale® and MEDDICC engagements, we work with sales leaders to help them build a consistent sales qualification language and process that’s aligned to their buyer. By clearly defining customer verifiable outcomes, and other qualification criteria, they’re able to make this common language a part of their sales organization’s DNA, weaving it into every core operation and deal. Plex is a great example of this consistency in action. Their story may be worth sharing with your portfolio company leaders.
3. How do managers inspect sales opportunities and pipelines?
As you support your portfolio company leaders in assessing their sales process, ensure manager coaching capabilities are a part of the conversation. Are front-line sales managers coaching reps in a way that drives accountability and repeatable sales impacts?
Looking at the manager-to-seller relationship is often a great place to identify red flags in a sales process. If your portfolio company's sales process supports manager success, the evidence will be present in their actions. Here are a few examples:
- Managers will consistently ensure reps follow the identified sales processes and activities to dissect, qualify and forecast their deals.
- Managers will dissect deals with reps regularly to ensure they are in the correct sales stage.
- Managers will leverage their tools and CRM systems to inspect deals, prepare coaching plans and go beyond just looking for compliance from salespeople.
- Managers will use opportunity reviews to help reps understand how to make an impact in the progression of their deal, rather than simply running through a compliance checklist.
We’ve seen firsthand the results sales teams can achieve when their sales process supports their front-line managers in driving consistent execution and accountability. Great sales leaders empower managers to coach and collaborate, they put a focus on incorporating these activities into their sales process, to ensure they aren’t skipped over.
If your portfolio company leaders have noticed gaps in their sales managers’ ability to create discipline around forecasting, share this guide. It covers action steps sales leaders may be able to use to fill those gaps in their managers’ skill sets.
4. How do specified sales stages align with forecasting?
Help your portfolio company leaders build alignment between critical sales stages and how they impact the forecast.
In our work with portfolio companies, we help their company leaders define customized forecasting categories by aligning them to the specific sales activities and customer verifiable outcomes that should occur in each particular stage. Generating this cross-functional agreement on forecasting categories and what takes place in each stage, helps to ensure that sales stages are aligned with the buyer and sales teams are building accurate revenue forecasts.
When aligning sales and forecasting stages, a great amount of detail goes into identifying and mapping customer verifiable outcomes to sales activities. This detail helps to ensure the refined sales process accurately connects buyer actions and seller actions to the correct sales stage and forecasting categories. When the sales process is structured in this way what results is: more confidence in the forecast, because everyone has a clear understanding of how to qualify a deal (by CVO) and what seller actions are required to move the opportunity to the next forecasting stage.
5. How do sales reps ensure opportunities are qualified?
As you work to develop a clear and predictable sales process with your portfolio company leaders, qualification will likely take up a majority of your conversations.
While there are various qualification methodologies out there, MEDDICC has become an increasingly popular tool that many companies are using to qualify the highest possible accounts and improve business predictability. Your portfolio companies may be considering MEDDICC (or its variants) for these reasons. When implemented successfully into a sales organization to sit on top of an already impactful sales process, MEDDICC can enable sales leadership to consistently predict the business.
Consider how you can support your portfolio company leaders in understanding what is required to drive MEDDICC success within their sales organization. If your portfolio company leaders are seriously considering implementing a new or elevated qualification tool, consider sharing this guide with them. It covers how to maximize the business impacts of MEDDICC with a consistent sales process and a value selling methodology.
Improve Business Predictability With a Solid Sales Process
If you're guiding your portfolio company leaders on the next steps of a strategic business change, ensure their sales process equips sales to execute and get results. See how Plex Systems built a disciplined focus on their buyer through their sales process and how this shift has improved revenue accuracy and growth.
