The sales process can be broken up into 3 different sectors. Pre-sale, selling, and post-sale.
Before you get in front of the potential customer, two different areas should be brushed up on and covered. Planning and preparing. Planning is where you basically identify who your customer is and how to uniquely tailor your product/pitch to fit their needs. You should branch it out much further than that like who the competitors are, but in short, that is the short of it. Preparing is gathering all of your planning data and throwing it all together for the proposed pitch you are about to make. Clearly having all the objectives and statements you want to make clear. Now practice the pitch until you get it fluent. These pre-sales steps are often the most overlooked and under-prepared for.
Sales is the execution of the hard work you put into your pre-sales. This is where is all comes together into the art you created it to be.
Post-sales is often the most hated step for most salespeople. Gathering information about a customer’s level of satisfaction with your product or service and how they are implementing it, is not a highly exciting activity. They are very integral, though! The evaluation of the call to your customer is the most important thing you can do.
Following these steps and being well prepared for every step will lead you to much better sales results and help your overall confidence. Being well researched and having a plan will translate into great practices outside of your professional life, as well. It is better to be over-prepared than under-prepared.
I hope this helps and provided some informative information on all the steps and the walk-through before coming up upon a pitch! All the best to you guys and have a great summer!!
BoweryJE22
Great post Alan, this is a great way of breaking up the sales process into a simple/practical way that allows you to keep track of where you are in a sale, and the necessary steps to take in that part of the sales process.
I think it is helpful to think about sales in this manner. It definitely makes it a lot less scary by breaking sales into 3 manageable parts. As with anything in life, it’s good to go after things piece by piece, rather than get overwhelmed by the beast at hand.
Alan- great post! I think the breaking up into 3 steps is huge and makes it seems much less daunting. On top of that, when approaching prospects and sales like a relationship and friendship it comes much more natural to want to satisfy their needs and make sure they are then satisfied with their product or service.
Sales can be overwhelming but this guide made it easier to ingest. Great post!