The Sales Process from the Buyer’s Point of View
Ein Gastblog von Kyle Jepson (Senior Inbound Sales Professor bei HubSpot)
Ist es ein Verkaufsprozess? Oder ist es ein Kaufprozess?
Today, we’re going to do what successful companies do: we’ll look at it from both directions at once.
Let’s explore how to make your sales process buyer centric. 👇
Was sind die käuferzentrierten Schritte im Verkaufsprozess?
A buyer-centric step in the sales process is one that’s represented from the buyer’s point of view. Der Verkaufsprozess ist eine Reihe von klar definierten Schritten und Methoden der Kommunikation zwischen einem Unternehmen und seinen Kunden. Perspektiven. Think about that step from the buyer’s perspective. How would they view this part of the sales process?
Wie kann man den Verkaufsprozess käuferorientiert gestalten?
In most cases, you can make the steps in your sales process buyer-focused simply by changing their names a little bit. But this little change can make a huge difference in the way your team operates. If you define the sales process around seller steps, then your reps might be thinking, “This is what I need to do with this buyer.” And then the buyer will feel like they’re being pulled through something that’s more the seller’s job than their own. But if you reframe the process to be from the buyer’s perspective, then your reps will be thinking, “This is what I need to help this buyer accomplish,” and the buyers will feel like they’re on the same page.
Buyer-centric means the sales team’s actions align with the buyer. Jeder Schritt im Verkaufsprozess sollte eine auf den Vertreter ausgerichtete Aktion mit einem auf den Käufer ausgerichteten Ergebnis sein.
Jeder Schritt im Verkaufsprozess konzentriert sich auf den Käufer und Ihr Team
Now, you might be thinking, “Wait a minute, you just said I should focus on the actions of my team, not the buyers.” This isn’t a contradiction. You want each step to be a combination of a rep-focused action and a buyer-focused outcome. For example, you might have a stage you’ve called “Demo.” Giving a demonstration of your product is an action your rep can take, but the exit criteria for the “Demo” stage should be something the buyer does, like scheduling another meeting or agreeing to have a proposal sent to them.
For most sales teams, sales reps can say, “It’s in the demo stage because I gave them a demo,” but that doesn’t say anything about where the buyer is in their journey.
Eine Demo ist ein Schritt zur Produktbewertung
Rename a demo step to “Product Evaluated,” and define the buyer exit criteria as:
- Der Käufer kam zur Demo und bekam seine Fragen beantwortet
- Bevor das Gespräch endete, setzte der Käufer ein weiteres Treffen an, um das weitere Vorgehen zu besprechen
- Der Käufer reagierte auf eine E-Mail, in der er den Termin und die nächsten Schritte bestätigte.
Was passiert nach einer Verkaufsdemo?
Now, instead of the sale moving to the next stage as soon as the rep walks away from the demonstration, the rep can only move it to the next stage if they answered the buyer’s questions, scheduled the next appointment, sent a recap email of what was discussed and what the next steps are, and gotten a response to that email confirming that the buyer has that same understanding. And you, as sales manager, can say, “Hey, I saw you moved that sale out of the evaluation stage. Can I see the email where the buyer verified your next steps?”
Wie genau sind Ihre Umsatzprognosen?
Wenn die Phasen Ihres Verkaufsprozesses gut definiert sind, werden die Prognosen, die Sie auf diesen Phasen aufbauen, genau sein.
Nutzen Sie Ihre Prognosen, um die nächste Etappe zu planen
Wenn Sie feststellen, dass 21% der Verkäufe, die die Bewertungsphase durchlaufen haben, in diesem Monat abgeschlossen wurden, können Sie sich darauf verlassen, dass dies von Monat zu Monat gleich bleibt. Und wenn die Konversionsrate von einer Phase zur nächsten niedriger ist als gewünscht, können Sie sich auf die Schulung und das Coaching Ihres Teams konzentrieren, damit es in diesen Phasen besser abschneidet. Mit einem Lernmanagementsystem können Sie die Fortschritte immer im Auge behalten.
Let’s review the standards of qualifying sales steps. The four standards of qualifying sales steps:
- Erforderlich
- Sachlich
- Einsehbar
- Käuferorientiert
Planen und überprüfen Sie Ihre Verkaufsschritte
So, look at your sales process and make sure every stage is required, factual, inspectable, and buyer-centric, and remove any stages that don’t meet those standards.
Then, lay out the factual, inspectable buyer outcomes that function as the exit criteria for each stage, and you’ll have a truly robust sales process. It might have a lot of stages or it might be fairly short, but don’t let that worry you too much.
Konzentrieren Sie sich auf einen Verkaufsprozess, der genau auf Sie zugeschnitten ist
Focus on creating a sales process that’s strong enough to be the foundation for your sales organization.
Wie viele Verkaufsstufen sollten Sie haben?
“We often get the question, how many stages should you have? And the answer is as many stages as it takes to create engagement and to keep the acceleration throughout the sales process. To prove out either disqualification or qualification. There’s a transactional process for some organizations; an enterprise deal might involve more steps. Sometimes people might short-sell themselves by creating a sales process that is short. If that’s the case, you end up with these pregnant pipelines that never give birth to deals, because the prospect hasn’t had an opportunity to engage in a way that would allow for them to convert to a customer, or allow them to even self-select and say this is not for me. Because obviously, the death of a salesperson is wasting too much time on a prospect that’s never going to buy.
On the other hand, some people make it too complicated. They make the sales process really long because something different has happened in a lot of different deals, at different stages. And they’re okay, well let’s bake that into our process. But by creating more complexity, they actually make it harder for the salespeople to be successful. It’s a catch-all. It’s almost like, let me try to bundle everything in for any eventuality. When in fact you have to trust your system. Right. And trust your process. Less is more – I believe that.” -Hilmon Sorey und Cory Bray, Autoren von The Sales Enablement Playbook
Pflegen Sie Ihre Beziehung zu Ihrem Kunden
Your relationship with the customer shouldn’t end when the sale closes. Maintain that relationship.
Your sales process should keep your company’s promise
As you go through this exercise, keep in mind that your relationship with a customer shouldn’t end when the sale closes. Part of your sales process is ensuring that your company is keeping the promises your sales team is making.
“If I interviewed your customers six months, nine months, 12 months after they bought your offering, did you deliver on the promises of value you pitched during the sales process? I need that to be above 80 or 85 percent. If you’re not doing that, you can’t build a business today on people who don’t end up realizing the value you pitch. That’s the first thing I need to assess. Number two, are they profitable? Are you making more money, are you making adequate money on the customers you sign up? In the world of SaaS, we talk about things like LTV to CAC ratios and payback periods. In general business, we talk about operating margin and net margin. However, you measure profitability, are you acquiring those customers at profitability?” – Mark Roberge, Senior Lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School
Engagieren Sie sich für zufriedene Kunden
It isn’t good enough anymore for salespeople to close sales without thinking about how satisfied the customer will be afterward.
Sorgen Sie dafür, dass Ihre Kunden langfristig zufrieden sind. Es gibt zwei Gründe, warum Ihr Vertriebsteam ein großes Interesse an der langfristigen Zufriedenheit Ihrer Kunden haben sollte. Erstens lassen sich glückliche Kunden viel leichter verkaufen als völlig fremde Kunden.
“It’s way easier to sell something to a company who’s already bought from you than it is to go out and find a new customer and even establish that you’re credible enough to sell for them in the first place. This goes beyond just selling more to that company through an up-sell or a cross-sell. It’s a great way to find leads. I’ll think about who would be a better sales development rep: a 22-year-old making the sale or your customer walking around the trade store floor with you telling everybody else how awesome you are. That’s something that some people overlook.” – Hilmon Sorey und Cory BrayAutoren von The Sales Enablement Playbook
Your customer’s voice impacts your business. Your customers’ word-of-mouth far outweighs your company’s marketing and sales efforts.
Ihre zufriedenen Kunden sind Teil Ihres Verkaufsteams. Kunden, die begeisterte Fans sind, bringen Ihnen mehr Aufträge ein.
“I recently talked to a CEO of a high-growth, early-stage company. They had a thousand customers, and they had two salespeople. They’re trying to grow to six salespeople. He was telling me about how there are still a limited number of salespeople. And I told him I didn’t agree with him. He asked what I meant, and I told him he doesn’t have six, or two, salespeople but that he has one thousand and two salespeople. He didn’t get it. And then he said he still didn’t understand. He repeated that he doesn’t have a thousand and two, just two. I said he has a thousand paid customers who are raving about his product. Those are your company’s best salespeople. If you stop to think well beyond the boundaries of the internal resources and tap into the power of your customers.
Ultimately, that’s what we’re helping companies at TrustRadius to do through reviews. But getting customers on the record and then leveraging their voice, their social proof, their authentic way of speaking. Then you can expand. If you think about teams as not just within the constraints of your walls, to really do something fascinating. I think when marketers start to realize that and bring back the customers truly at the center of everything that they do, it will help not only marketing, but it will tremendously help sales. And there’s no salesperson that will ever say there aren’t enough reviews or customer references or someone that can talk on behalf of the product.
There are no marketers that have ever felt the pain of more salespeople continuously asking for more. There’s ways to do it these days, but people are still used to the old traditional way or case studies. There are better ways. There are better tools. People don’t just yet know the tools. But it’s changing.” Bertrand Hazard, Leiter des Marketing- und Vertriebsteams bei TrustRadius
Schaffen Sie zufriedene Kunden, die Ihnen treu bleiben. Konzentrieren Sie sich auf die Maßnahmen, die Ihre Kunden dazu bringen, langfristig bei Ihnen zu bleiben.
Zufriedene Kunden können ein großer Gewinn für Ihr Verkaufsteam sein
And the opposite is also true: unhappy customers can be a major obstacle for your sales team. So, make sure you design your sales process so that you close the sale and people turn into customers who will advocate for your company. As you think about the exit criteria for each stage, don’t just focus on the actions that will help your reps close the sale. Focus on the actions that will turn your prospects into long-term customers. That might require you to have steps that happen after the sale closes.
“I looked around to a lot of the other sales ops people who are in Austin, and everyone sort of said one thing which is: You have stages after the closed-won. For us, we have eight stages leading up to closed-won. And then stage nine, which is where we hand off to the implementation team. Stage 10, which is the in-process, implementation, Then stage 11 for us going live. That company is now fully live with us, and we can track the entire stage progression through that. We know how long it takes for the client success team to react to that closed-won deal, how long it takes for that implementation period if it’s a few days up to a month. And then that deal that we closed-won, has now gone live.
So, we can see that as a closed-won deal without it getting stuck in that implementation phase, which was a problem for us for a little bit. Once our account executive closes a deal, it goes to an implementation team and a client success team member. We actually did a good rollout of whose responsibility is what, who leads the conversation, who is in charge of scheduling the next conversation – that sort of thing. And the account executive really plays a back-seat role there.
Once the deal is live, the account executive is still responsible for it, but most of the day-to-day maintenance, the success management is done by our success team.” Mike Venman, Sales Operations Leader bei Hearth, einem FinTech-Unternehmen
Legen Sie Ihre Verkaufsgrundlage fest.
Ihr Team sollte Leads in zufriedene Kunden verwandeln, wenn:
- Sie definieren alle Schritte in Ihrem Verkaufsprozess.
- Stellen Sie sicher, dass jeder Schritt klare Ausstiegskriterien hat.
Then you’ll have the foundation of your sales process. Your sales foundation is turning leads into happy customers. Follow the two steps described, and you’ll be on your way to having a solid foundation.
Ein wenig über Kyle:
Kyle unterrichtet Vertriebs- und CRM-Kurse an der HubSpot Academy. Er ist vor allem für seine Arbeit an der HubSpot Sales Software Zertifizierung und der Sales Enablement Zertifizierung bekannt. Er ist Vater von drei Kindern, glücklicher Ehemann einer ebenso glücklichen Frau und strebt danach, Autor eines dieser Taschenbuchromane zu werden, die man in den Kassenschlangen von Lebensmittelgeschäften sieht. Folgen Sie Kyle auf LinkedIn und Twitter.
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