Why Your 'Freestyle' Sales Team Is Failing (And What to Do About It)

[Dopious]

What if you could make your sales forecast 33% more accurate?

A structured sales process is the blueprint that guides high-performing teams from generating leads to closing deals. While some salespeople rely on charisma, the most successful organizations build a repeatable, proven playbook. In fact, companies with a formal sales process are 33% more likely to be high performers and can see up to 28% more revenue than those without one.

A well-defined sales process is a dynamic framework that provides a clear sequence of steps for converting prospects into loyal customers. It streamlines efforts and ensures consistency in customer interactions, which is crucial for building long-term trust.

Core Benefits of a Strong Sales Process​

Implementing a standardized sales process offers significant advantages that drive growth and stability :

• Increased Efficiency With a clear roadmap, salespeople spend less time on redundant tasks and more time on high-value activities, focusing on behaviors that lead to a sale.
• Faster Onboarding A documented process makes it easier to train new hires, reducing their ramp-up time and helping them become productive more quickly.
• Improved Predictability A structured process provides a clearer view of the sales pipeline, leading to more accurate sales forecasting and better strategic planning.
• Consistent Customer Experience When every prospect receives the same high-quality service, it strengthens your brand and fosters customer loyalty.
• Data-Driven Improvement By tracking performance at each stage, you can collect valuable data to identify bottlenecks, refine strategies, and continuously improve your approach.

How to Build Your Sales Process​

Developing an effective process begins with a deep understanding of your customer. Your process should mirror their buying journey. From there, you can build a strategic framework based on three core pillars:

1. Attract This phase is about new customer acquisition. It involves prospecting to identify potential clients, conducting a needs analysis to understand their pain points, and closing the initial deal to establish a relationship.
2. Develop Once a customer is on board, the focus shifts to deepening the relationship. This means actively working to increase customer value by offering complementary products or services that address their evolving needs.
3. Retain The final pillar is centered on customer loyalty. By providing outstanding support and proactive service, you ensure customers succeed with your solution, making them more likely to stay and recommend your business to others.

A Typical Sales Process Framework​

While every process should be customized, most follow a series of fundamental steps for acquiring new customers:

• Prospecting Identifying potential customers who fit your ideal client profile using methods like market research, networking, and analyzing customer databases.
• Contact and Qualification Initiating contact to understand the prospect's needs and determine if they have the budget, authority, and need for your solution.
• Presentation and Solution Engaging in deeper conversations to present a tailored solution that directly addresses the prospect's challenges.
• Proposal and Quotation Creating a formal offer that outlines the solution, terms, and pricing based on the specific requirements discussed.
• Negotiation and Closing Handling objections, negotiating the final terms, and formally closing the sale.

A Process of Continuous Evolution​

An effective sales process is never truly "finished." It must be treated as a living document that requires regular evaluation and refinement. By analyzing metrics like conversion rates between stages, the length of the sales cycle, and where deals most often stall, you can proactively optimize your approach. This commitment to continuous improvement ensures your team remains agile and competitive in an ever-changing market.

What tools or technologies have you found most effective for managing and tracking your sales process?

 

[roydan]

Actually I want to try something that I think is pretty creative with hyper relevant approach to cold emails at scale.

I have a general idea of how to pull that off, I want to call out come competitors and include local rankings, etc..
With these I can pretty easily craft a compelling offer, even automatically.

Very excited to give that a go.

 

[t2van]

In terms of faster on boarding.

We have an internal wiki that's everything from "printer don't work" to "how to handle stock" and "intos etc"

Anything that needs to be explained once we document it for the next person.

Any workflows we use, adapt or take on goes into the wiki.

Staff have access to almost all of it (bar manager level) so they can learn, adapt and grow and improve them self's and the company and maybe or hopefully bring in new ideas and processes.

Selling.

Well we still figure that bit out B2b we got ideas there's no real dedicated sales force.

Sales.

We got our own internal app called oakwood. It monitors sales, customers, can assign preoeders etc.

It does well for tracking popular products, failing one's etc.

At the moment we are trying to upgrade it with an ai that can monitor trends in market and social platforms so we can predict and prepare for stock issues or find out why things preform or don't.

Customer retention

We just do old fashioned customer service. If things go wrong we just own it.

We send b2c and b2b customers voucher, tea bag and kitkat in the post to say sorry we f*ked up.

With a voucher to use to give us another chance.

That normally retains 88% of pissed off customers of that 92% become lifetime.

Most get things go wrong and we are human. We just want a chance to fix it, learn from it and make sure it don't happen again.