Is Your Sales Process Working as Hard as You Are?

Revenue is clearly a measure of how well your sales process is serving your goals. But it’s not the only one. There are at least eight others, each of which supports the success of your sales efforts —and in turn the success of your company.

Here they are.

1. Margins are growing
2. Net realization is higher
3. The size of your biggest wins is getting bigger
4. You lose fewer deals because you give away solutions to soon
5. More value is created within the sales process and customer turnover is reduced
6. The sales cycle is shrinking—in other words, time-to-sale is shorter
7. You see ways to increase your target market you might not have seen before
8. New business developers get up to speed faster and new business development costs go down.

Let’s take a closer look at how these puzzle pieces fit together.

A recent Economist magazine podcast, for example, explained that a private equity firm had done a good job of increasing the revenues of their portfolio companies overall. Even so, the higher expected margins just weren’t there.



Deal Size: Over some thirty years of sales consulting and training we have seen too many companies that can’t break through glass ceilings they should absolutely be able to. When we began training a health-care client’s salespeople, for instance, the company’s largest sale had been $125 million. The first sale after we developed a strong customized sales process was for a billion dollars a year for five years—eight times larger than the company’s previous largest sale and 40 times larger over the life of the contract. Ninety days later they made a second billion-dollar sale.



Transforming the sales process using our proven model was critical but so was our experience in knowing how to train this particular kind of sales force. The sales force consisted largely of highly skilled and educated subject-matter professionals, including PhDs and MDs. We’ve learned that experts in any field are not surprisingly often enamored of the product or process itself. When selling they sometimes devote too much time to talking about the product and not enough time learning about the needs of the prospect. In this case, we helped them learn to use their unmatched expertise as a powerful tool to create value within their sales process.

Here's another example. Fortune 500 companies regularly invited one of our law firm clients to bid on highly lucrative projects. But for some reason they couldn’t explain they had lost five of these opportunities in a row. That’s when they came to us for help. We upgraded their consultative selling skills and developed custom sales processes. They won the next five bids in a row.

Net Realization is the difference between the fee or rate you should have proposed, should have agreed to, and should have collected versus what you actually quoted, agreed to, and collected.

For example: The average large law firm’s net realization is 84 percent. We have individual lawyers as clients whose net realization is more than 100 percent. Why? Because by using the stronger sales process we helped them develop, they are able to charge above the standard rate—and get the engagements.

Key Point: Lower net realization can happen for one or a combination of these two reasons: 1) Undervaluing the quality of your service or product and 2) Not being able to convince a prospect of the value of your delivery, which means not having, or using, effective skills of persuasion.

Giving Away Intellectual Property: As part of my discovery process with the head of an engineering firm, I asked about the tendency of his business developers to give away their creative ideas—even solutions—while they were trying to make a sale. He agreed this had to be a big problem but admitted that he didn’t know just how big. Using the sales process we teach, I helped him determine the true size of the problem. It turned out to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Shorter Sales Cycles: We have never seen a sales cycle that couldn’t be shortened—that is, become more efficient and effective. On average we can help reduce sales cycles by as much as 25 percent, which, depending on the challenge, can be anywhere from one month to one year.

Timeframe for New Salespeople to Become Cost Effective: Some companies practice “hire and hope” when bringing new business developers on board. Even if a new hire was successful in another industry or company, it’s really not possible to know whether they can be that successful in their new role with you.

With a proven, established sales process in place, however, their odds of success go up significantly. A new sales representative should of course be encouraged to offer suggestions for improving the sales process. We’ve found that when our process has been implemented and proven successful—in place when a new rep is hired—it makes identifying the reason for poor sales from a new rep can be narrowed to fewer causes, one of which is often the rep themselves.