Sales Best Practices to Beat the Competition: 3-Step Formula
Highlights:
The secret to sales best practices isn’t to dissect your competitors — it’s to know what you already do well, and then do more of it.
Document your sales process, reflect on what’s working and what’s not working, and share tactics across the sales organization to do more of what works.
It’s common best practices in sales for businesses to compete in their corner of the market by scrutinizing their competition. Oftentimes, this means attempting to reverse-engineer their competitors’ sales successes so they can reap the same benefits.
That’s not a bad strategy, but the real key to beating your competition lies not in what they’re doing right, but in what you’re doing right already.
Looking inward to figure out what’s led to your greatest sales achievements, then documenting those processes and turning them into repeatable best practices in sales, will optimize what’s already working for you and capitalize on the skills your sales department already has.
Optimizing your sales process, puts you in a better position to connect with customers who truly need and will value your product or service, which can then lead to a higher customer lifetime value overall.
Businesses that implement a repeatable process for lead nurture, for example, have much higher close rates than those that don’t, and companies that utilize marketing automation in their prospect nurture stage see 451% more qualified leads than those that don’t.
We’ve helped many of our clients achieve repeatable wins. Here, we’ve adapted our proven formula for capturing sales best practices to apply specifically to midsize-to-enterprise sales teams.
Our Three-Step Formula for Capturing Best Sales Practices
1. DOCUMENT YOUR SALES PROCESS
Sales enablement — training your reps to sell — starts with process documentation. This means writing down the step-by-step instructions for your sales process, including elements like timelines, checklists, visual aids, scripts, and resources for further development.
Not only does process documentation help you onboard new sales associates faster — because everything they need to know to get started is right there in the document — but it can also help you ensure consistent adherence to sales best practices across complex, multi-team sales departments.
The right technology can make this easier and more error-proof, helping you capture process data quickly and providing your sales experts with collaborative, intelligent, to-the-minute information to better enable them to meet their goals.
Here are three ways that document management software (DMS), in particular, can help with process documentation:
DMS makes it easy to create and organize your documents and allow all the members of your sprawling, cross-functional teams to access the same resources all at once, which is great for streamlining filing systems and even better for process documentation. There are also major time savings — knowledge workers lose about 50% of their time manually managing and preparing documents.
With the ability for all your sales agents to edit and add to process documents at any time, your documents have a better chance of being updated with the latest sales best practices in real-time, as your agents are discovering them.
It’s not just the human hive mind that’s useful here; some software can take the improvements a step further with AI. Microsoft SharePoint, for example, has a functionality called Syntex that will comb through your organization’s data and glean insights that can help improve your processes.
2. REFLECT ON WHAT’S WORKING — AND WHAT’S NOT
Enterprise companies in particular often have long, complicated sales cycles — sometimes six months or more — which can make it easy to lose focus on creating repeatable processes. When your team has been working on landing one unique client for months, it’s all too easy to forget that the sales techniques you’ve used to achieve your success are likely to work for other clients as well.
But with long sales cycles come many opportunities to check in and capture best sales practices — they just need to be built into the process. Scheduling regular meetings dedicated to look-backs, sharing both successes and struggles, will help guard against team siloing and encourage creative pivots when teams are faced with new challenges. Win/loss analysis looks at company, team, and individual performance across a wide range of variables to determine why a deal was won or lost. The data collected from these analyses can be used to build visualizations that can be shared across the organization.
Using systems to collect and analyze sales data consistently and reflect on what’s working and what’s not is one of the best ways to figure out what sales techniques and processes need improvement. Retracing the steps in a disappointing sales process makes it possible to isolate weak spots that can be then strengthened with training, better data, or targeted technology.
3. SHARE SUCCESSFUL SALES BEST PRACTICES ACROSS YOUR ORGANIZATION
In addition to sharing information in regular meetings and post-mortems, strategies and sales techniques that have led to success should be made available across the company so that other teams can incorporate relevant best practices into their own processes.
One client of ours, a large technology company, already had a process for this when they brought us on board to improve it. Their WinWires were an inspired way to distribute success stories company-wide — but they needed help optimizing and scaling their approach. We were able to build them a more efficient WinWire pipeline, which enabled them to improve processes in real time.
A structured process for sharing best practices across teams and departments can help improve efficiency and increase success across your entire organization.
When you look inward, focusing your efforts on capturing and repeating your own organization’s successful tactics and strategies, you play to your agents’ strengths — which means, among other things, increasing your differentiation in your market.
Repeatable sales best practices take the best elements of your sales process — those that are already setting you apart from your competition — and enhances them, making you stand out even more and attracting more qualified leads, which your team is then better able to close because they have the resources they need to repeat their own previous successes.
Let Prime 8 Help You Create Your Own Sales Best Practices
If these best practices sound cyclical, that’s by design. The sales process is a cycle, and so is capturing best sales practices — it’s an ongoing process of constant improvement on what’s already working and solving what’s not.
That’s how you beat out your competition on your own terms.
Prime 8 Consulting takes a programmatic approach to helping companies develop profitable sales strategies and tactical growth plans. When building a solution for you, our holistic framework considers all aspects of sales and the sales cycle, including alliance relationships, process efficiency, operational optimization, business intelligence to find new opportunities, and sales enablement learning programs to build high-performing sales teams.
We’d love to hear more about your needs. Reach out to our revenue experts today for a free consultation.
