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The Ultimate Guide to B2B Sales Process - Chapter 1

Easy to Sell, Easy to Buy.

February 8, 2021 5 min read

Why do so many companies underinvest in their sales process when its one of the best ways to increase your sales and boost staff and customer happiness?

I can only surmise that it’s because it’s not talked about or thought about enough. So let’s change that!

My experience from managing high performing sales teams for over 20 years has taught me that making your products easy to sell and easy to buy is the single biggest thing you can do to help you sell more. Are your products easy to sell?” (Or at least as easy as they could be). Or as Mark Cuban puts it:

Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.

— Mark Cuban

Why Listen to Me?

Firstly, a little about me. I’m Matt Hollis, CEO at Flexile and I have been lucky enough to work at some very successful and very fast growing Australian technology companies such as Vocus and PIPE Networks. This has entailed working with some of Australia’s best technology entrepreneurs in exciting, fast paced and challenging work environments that led me to become a sales process and data nerd - when you have to double sales every year, you need to have great process.

The very first step before thinking about sales process is to make sure your product is at least good and ideally great. If your product is not good stop reading now and fix it (or if you are a sales person with little say over the product development - get another job). Your products are the foundation of everything you do. A great sales process can help if your product is good, but not great. If your product is poor no amount of sales process will help.

Great Companies are built on great products.

— Elon Musk

What is Sales Process?

The Sales Process is how you go about selling your products and typically begins from a lead and follows all the way through to a completed order.

I have always separated the sales process into 3 key areas:

1. Pipeline (tracking, reporting etc - typically in a CRM these days - please don’t tell me you still use a spreadsheet…)
2. Quoting (getting a price capable of acceptance to a customer in writing – because B2B)
3. Ordering (turning the quote, if needed into an order form and contract so you can get the signature!)

You only need one of these to be broken to cause significant issues. One business I did some work for many years ago took on average 5 working days to issue an order form once the customer had accepted the quote and was ready to order. This was because “Those sales people keep making mistakes on the order form so they all need to be checked!” The checking had to be done by the technical approver, the legal approver and the commercial approver before the order could be sent to the customer. The customers were unhappy, the sales team was unhappy and the approvers were unhappy at having to check every order. This failure caused not only lost orders and reputational damage but was also creating a culture of fear and driving staff to leave.

Over the years many CEOs or sales leaders have complained to me that their sales team is not good enough and they need better sales people and/or training for their existing team. In every instance where I have looked into this further their sales process has been difficult, complicated or slow, and fixing the process solved the majority of their problems.

If your sales process is great your sales people need only be good at selling, if it’s poor you need great sales people who not only can sell and but can also paper over the cracks in your sales process. Sales people of this calibre are rare and usually very well paid by their current employer.

So while hiring unicorn sales staff and teaching the latest sales techniques are important, you need to fix your sales process first.

Pipeline - from Lead to Closed Won.
Now, I may be a teensy bit obsessed with data, but once you have experienced great sales data it’s super hard to go back. Exactly what you record depends on your business, however it’s most likely that this part of the sales process falls down because management does not enforce data quality.

Note: Mandatory fields are not the answer (we have all seen the full stop used to circumvent a mandatory field). You need to enforce data integrity through clearly detailed requirements and penalties for non-conformance. Quality should be cultural! I always pity companies who tell me they can’t get sales people to fill in CRM properly.

A CFO once lamented to me “we have tried everything and sales just won’t provide the data we need” I asked him what they had tried to enforce data accuracy and everything he said boiled down to “We ask them to do it.” I believe your commission plan should have a requirement to fill CRM in properly with the proviso that if it’s not filled in your sales rep doesn’t get paid commission on the deal. You only need to enforce this once and suddenly - great data!

The value of getting your reporting on point (apart from making you look great to your boss) can’t be understated. As well as helping you improve the management of your business, it will allow you to see exactly where your issues are. It’s a data driven world - get involved!

To manage your pipeline, I am assuming that you have a good CRM with good reporting. If you don’t, stop reading and go get one right now. Depending on your requirements there are lots of good options, and some of our current favs include; Salesforce (because it connects to everything), Zoho and Pipedrive (great bang for your buck with API access!!).

Quoting
A great sales process will reduce the time required to quote because speed helps you sell more.

A great example is from Vocus Communications where we delivered fibre based data services. If a building was not connected to our fibre network we had to get the Fibre Operations team to quote the build cost which took on average 5 working days. On analysis we realised that 80% of our quotes were in CBDs and a few key business corridors of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. We then calculated an average build cost for these areas and classified tens of thousands of buildings as near-net and immediately quotable. This one change meant quoting time went from 5 business days to instantaneous which resulted in a fourfold increase in fibre services sold in the 12 months post the change.

I will devote a chapter of this guide to Quoting as it’s so critical, but upfront I would encourage you to think about what I call ‘business rules’. These are the rules of quoting for your business. They may include margins, what products can be quoted without additional approval, discounting process etc. Once you have all your rules documented and it’s working well you can then look at building these rules into your sales process to further improve quoting. Step one is documenting them!

Ordering
Ordering seems simple, right? You have quoted the customer, they have said ‘Yes!’ And it’s time to get a legally binding commitment. Given how an order is the culmination of so much work (marketing, lead gen, sales time, quoting, negotiation etc) I am often shocked at how badly some companies handle this part of the process. To me this is a very dangerous time, the customer is hot and in buying mode, a failure to get the order form to them in a timely manner (and that means hours, not days) will negatively impact your brand and can lose you the deal.

I know I hate chasing a company for an order form. I start thinking, “geez what happens when I need support or an upgrade if it takes this long for an order form?”

The key to a great ordering process is getting quoting right so you are ready to immediately move to an order form. Ideally any further approvals are minimised (for example, approvals at order form stage are usually a sign of a gatekeeper role being required to check accuracy because of issues at the quoting stage).

Getting ordering right is critical. A great ordering process means you are sending the order form within hours from the “yes”. Anything longer than this should be looked at and improved upon. If you want to ‘go for gold’ an automated document generation process attached to your CRM so it’s just a button press for your sales team is the holy grail of sales process.

Takeaways (for the skim readers)

1. Use CRM and enforce data quality
2. Great Quoting process will improve your Ordering process
3. Focus on speed, it will help you sell more!

Matt Hollis
Co-founder & CEO at Opvia

Other Chapters

Chapter 2 - Business Benefits of a Great Sales Process