GTM leaders: 3 tips for building a repeatable and consistent sales process

Without a clear and repeatable sales process, sellers can struggle through a meandering, often lengthy sales experience.   

They’re left shooting from the hip — enablement can’t properly enable reps and the buyer experience quickly becomes disjointed, leaving prospects with a bad experience.

The snowball effect quickly comes into play. Deals slated to close at the end of one quarter slip into the next, and you lose trust in your pipeline.

This is what you generally see at early-stage companies. Sales processes are fluid — they have to be when you’re still searching for product-market fit. 

But once you’re ready to scale, an intentionally-designed, clear, and repeatable sales process — built in collaboration with enablement — will pave the way for your enablement team to ramp reps effectively, bringing clarity and predictability to GTM teams.

Sales processes take many forms and there’s no shortage of frameworks or methodologies to work with — but the specifics of your organization’s sales process will be driven by your market, your stage, your product, and other factors. 

But regardless of the details, these 3 principles apply:

1. Build it around your buyers — not your sellers. A mistake I see when leaders design sales processes is focusing on their sellers: At x stage, our seller took y step, and it resulted in z outcome. What matters isn’t what your seller did, but what your buyer did — and by extension, how your seller responded.

And trust me, as an enablement leader I understand the temptation to focus on your sellers first, but fight that urge and build around buyers.

Build the process in terms of customer behavior, not seller behavior from the outset. To keep the process oriented toward real buyer pains and actions, leverage as much buyer data as possible — conversational highlights, email touchpoints, recurring pain, recurring breakthroughs.

2. Get buy-in from your managers. Managers represent a crucial point of success or failure in enablement programs and sales processes. If they understand and believe in the why behind it, they can help their reps do the same and facilitate a successful implementation. If they don’t, they can’t.

Getting manager buy-in raises the likelihood that sellers will adopt a new sales process. When you’re designing it, ask for and incorporate their feedback. When you’re implementing it, clearly articulate why you’re doing it — i.e., how the business as a whole stands to benefit from a strong sales process — so they can do the same for their reps.

The main reason why reps don’t use a sales process is because they don’t believe it’s going to help them close deals faster — they don’t understand the why behind it. Manager buy-in naturally extends to rep buy-in.

3. Embed it in your managers’ operating rhythms — and iterate. Be sure that managers orient their reps around the steps of the sales process. Have them reference it in deal reviews,  during quarterly business reviews and forecasting calls. Have them coach it during one-on-ones. 

The more embedded it is in managers’ operating rhythms, the more likely it is that sellers will stay bought in over time.

As with any new process, success comes from iterating. 

Intuitively, you might think that requiring specific steps in a sales process would slow down deals. But it’s the opposite. 

When you’ve got a clear process tailored to buyer needs that the whole org buys into, enablement can set reps up for success – allowing for faster time to ramp, a decrease in deal friction, and closing more, more predictably.