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The CRO's guide to creating an effective sales process

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As W. Edwards Deming said, “If you cannot describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” Unfortunately, this describes too many sales organizations today.

Most Chief Revenue Officers (CROs) would likely say their sellers aren’t following a formal sales process when reaching out to buyers. Our research shows that ineffective sales processes are sales leaders’ second-biggest challenge, coming in behind only inefficient internal operations. Often, that’s because sales processes haven’t progressed to the formal or dynamic maturity level.

How can you help your organization progress to sales process maturity? Here are six steps to take.

1 Ground your sales process in a sound selling methodology

Consistently following a formal sales methodology — the framework that explains how to approach each phase of the sales process — leads to higher quota attainment, win rates and lower seller attrition. The more your organization reinforces your sales methodology, offering sellers feedback and coaching and updating the process to reflect changing market conditions, the better the results.

Read about our sales methodology research that drives deals forward and leads to higher win rates in the eBook.

2 Understand the buyer’s journey

Sellers need to understand how buyers embark on a buying decision, moving through the stages of awareness from consideration to decision. But the buyer’s journey is growing ever more complex.

Discover how you can ensure consistent positive cross-channel interactions to improve buyer engagement within our eBook.

3 Align your sales process with the buyer’s journey

Instead of leading their buyers, sellers must follow their buyers’ lead. That means they have to understand how their buyer prefers to solve problems.

Read more in the eBook on how you can align your sales enablement functions to increase win rates by +11 points.

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4 Adopt a formal sales forecasting process

Most sales organizations have a forecasting process, however forecasts continue to be wrong more than half the time. That’s because sales forecasts are often informal or subjective, using informal data collection or undefined cadences.

Discover how you can develop a formal, structured forecasting review process to increase your win rates of forecasted deals by 25%.

5 Embrace call planning tools

To make a call planning tool effective, you must do more than give it to a seller. You also need to ensure that you train sellers on how to use it and follow up on that training with sales coaching and sales enablement.

Learn how you can improve the call planning process at your organization by reading our e-book.

6 Instate formal opportunity planning

Few sales organizations use formal opportunity planning techniques. They often treat opportunity planning as an event, not as a process. It’s important for sales organizations to find ways to fill their sales funnels with opportunities. However, sellers must be deliberate and strategic to get the highest return on their investment of time and resources.

Discover how to decide which opportunities will yield the highest return on investment.

Build a dynamic sales process to raise win rates and quota attainment

Following these six tips will help you build a more dynamic sales process. But defining your processes is just the beginning. That’s where the Korn Ferry Intelligence Cloud comes in. When you connect sales technology with sales methodology powered by the Intelligence Cloud, you get actionable insights into your current sales process. But, perhaps more importantly, you will also find areas where you can improve, helping you refine your process, training and coaching.

To learn how you can improve your sales performance and get the most out of your organization’s tech stack, read more in our eBook.