Welcome to Step 09. Want to jump back to our full 11 step Business Growth process?

Sales process with Sales enablement

As a HubSpot Certified Partner, we improve your sales process so that it’s consultative, in-depth, and infused with content to ensure you give value, as a way to educate and nurture your leads and customers. We also take the 360 approach of leads to prospects → prospect to customers → repeat customers to evangelists, the journey never ends…

How do we help sales? We enable salespeople by providing content, deal support, training, best practices, knowledge, and the right tools and technology throughout the sales process.

We use the Inbound Sales methodology

The steps we’ll take to create your sales process

1. Review of deals won and lost
2. Content that has been successful at each stage of the buying journey
3. How can you make it easy for prospects to ‘fire’ their current supplier - make it easy to transition?
4. What do your existing customers buy from you - Upsell/cross sell opportunities?
5. How to turn customers into evangelists (to create case studies and testimonials)?

We’ll ask questions to find the best way to nurture leads and convert into customers

1. After the lead downloads an ebook, what is the next step?
2. Are you putting them into a workflow?
3. Will the sales person call them within 5 minutes to see if the lead has any questions after the download?
4. Are there any issues preventing a close?
5. Do marketing and sales need to meet to discuss conversion rates?
6. We’ll also talk about your Ideal customers challenges to see if Positioning statements can help to open conversations during prospecting activity

Then we create your sales playbook

Your sales process is setup in HubSpot CRM and HubSpot Sales as deal stages, Templates, and Sequences and your sales playbook defines:

1. What’s expected at each stage of the sales process
2. Actions
3. Who with
4. Tools to use

Your sales team playbook typically uses four stages of prospecting and sales

1. Connecting to open the conversation

This is your sales team’s first live conversation with a prospect. On this call, you introduce yourself, break down resistance, get into a conversation, and ultimately schedule a first appointment.

This call isn’t about sales - it’s about helping everybody! That will sound strange to most owners, leaders, and salespeople, but consider the ways that we, The Tree Group, can help:

1. Advice about Lead generation, customer acquisition, and client engagement
2. Talking about your biggest challenge
3. HubSpot Academy free education & certification courses
4. HubSpot Marketing FREE, HubSpot CRM & HubSpot Sales FREE
5. Access to 400 ebooks with advice on business challenges and solutions
6. HubSpot Research to show how Inbound gives a competitive advantage
7. Recommendations for helpful industry events
8. Website grader with ideas to improve your website
9. HubSpot trial to benchmark you against your competitors
10. Ideas to help companies GROW

2. Exploring to excite and assess fit

The Exploratory process, besides being an opportunity to share with your prospects, is an opportunity to learn from your prospects. Ultimately by learning about your prospect, you can determine if they need your help, are interested in your help, and if you can help. Use the guide below for questions you can use in different parts of the process. You won’t use all or even most of the questions on a single call so select the ones that will help the most. This call is also about qualifying so we’ll cover a lot of questions about:

1. The company
2. Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing
3. Goals, Plans, and Challenges
4. Cost of inaction

The end of this stage is about assigning homework to your prospect to gauge their level of engagement and build up a picture of their needs and demands. Home work ideas at this stage include Graders, Metrics, Analysis

3. Goal setting and planning

If you have a consultative sales process, having a goal setting and planning stage is helpful to establish targets and to determine a plan that can help your clients reach their goals. Before the meeting ends, you’ll be giving a sense pricing and, if services are included, resource requirements. At this stage we’ll cover:

1. Review of notes from the Connect and Exploratory stages
2. Review answers to the homework that was assigned at the last stage and use the feedback to build out content for this stage such as a analysis calculators, go live planning tool to work backwards from the start date, and ROI calculators.
3. You’ll set and agenda for the meeting, review your research based on the homework, then develop a plan with the prospect so show you understand their business and have the right recommendations to deliver on their goals and requirements.
4. Tie-down questions and setting budget expectation to get buy-in and to help you progress through this stage towards close.
5. We’ll also refer back to the BANT framework to help you qualify Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. We’ll also pair this with the Cost of inaction to give you a clear picture of the likelyhood the prospect will become a customer.
6. Finally, it’s about keeping your prospect engaged using the homework approach, booking the next meeting, and sharing content to get you ready close.

4. Demo

Not always needed, unless you have a product that your prospects will use, either physically or online, the demo stage is where you prove you know the right solution for your prospect and will setup a personalised demo. This is the show how your product will work for your prospect. It’s your chance to show that you fully understand your prospects requirements and have the solution to help

5. Advising to close the sale

So far you’ve Identified qualified leads, Connected with prospects to open the sales conversation, and Explored with prospects to excite and assess fit. The next step is to present and close. At this stage your playbook helps you:

1. Pitch correctly
2. Make sure you’re ready to pitch and ask for the business
3. Lead your presentation with the most compelling reason first
4. Recap the prospect’s goals and targets
5. Show the impact of using your products and services to achieve targets
6. Present a plan and options
7. Confirm timing
8. Recommend the solution
9. Inspire confidence in your ability to deliver

The playbook will typically include

Hero and positioning statements - these are descriptions of your Ideal customers challenges followed by a question as to whether it resonates or not.

Lead qualification matrix, created earlier in the process to identify sales ready leads

Views in the CRM for your sales team to easily identify your leads and customers

Advice on organising your day - Block time out through the day for sales activity, planning, research, development.

Make sure to leave spaces either side for checking emails and other regular tasks. We recommend reading Work Smarter: Live Better by Cyril Peupion

We’ll include some information on the best time to make sales calls and will also recommend an app that works in HubSpot and gives recommended times and days to email/call each contact.

Then we’ll run some role plays to practice the approach

We’ll also consider your activity for the different lead sources

1. Upselling to customers
2. Asking customers for referrals
3. Contacting previously lost opportunities
4. Inbound leads from your content and website
5. Inbound companies visiting your website
6. Using social selling to monitor for trigger events and approach passive buyers

Contacts list for sales activity

Next we come up with the contact list for your sales team to start working. Part of this activity includes creating Smart lists that auto update as new people match the criteria and Static lists for targeting a fixed list of people. We’ll consider:

1. Upselling to customers
2. Asking your customers for referrals
3. Using Advocate searches to see when Ideal personas move to new companies
4. Semi-trusted leads based on closed lost deals
5. Inbound leads generated through your website and content
6. Inbound companies that have looked at your website but not yet converted
7. Face to face events
8. Passive buyers that match your Ideal customer profile and personas

And before we reach the final step we look at how Workflows and automation can reduce your manual work

Then, it’s about coaching your sales team through the process so they’re efficient and effective at sales to help you grow your business.

For clients not on our full Business Growth programme, we offer these Sales enablement packages

Basic - typically a one-off project

1. Technology Stack Evaluation
2. Technology Implementation
3. Integrations and Customisation
4. Reporting
5. Buyer Profiles
6. Buyer Personas
7. QL Definition
8. Sales Stages and Process
9. Scripts and Guides

Professional - typically an ongoing programme

1. Inbound Marketing Strategy and Execution
2. SLA Development
3. Sales Decks
4. Case Studies
5. Methodology Selection
6. Methodology Development
7. Methodology Rollout
8. Competitive Intelligence
9. Competitive Positioning

Enterprise - typically delivered in campaigns

1. Technology Training
2. Methodology Training
3. Playbook Training
4. Product Training
5. Ongoing Coaching
6. Customer Reference Calls
7. Deal Strategy

Once your sales process is complete, we follow the agile approach of 1) theory, 2) action, 3) outcome, 4) learn...

Next, Step 10. Outsourcing your sales prospecting...