Chapter 3

The Sales Process

Conversational flow, sales stages from prospecting to closing, exit criteria, and where customer success fits in the process.

Now that we have the compass, where do we go with it? We understand that the process is about getting prospects to fall in trust with us, and we know that it’s all about building a Seller’s Journey that supports the Buyer’s Experience, so how do we put everything together?

The first thing to understand about any sales process is conversational flow. What order should a sales conversation follow? And how do you do it so that the experience is wonderful for your prospects and customers?

One of the things you’ll notice in the process’s staging and naming is that no activity is the name of a stage. Any activity such as “demo” or sending a proposal is a part of the overall process and not the name of an actual stage. In fact, demos conducted or proposals sent are merely exit criteria from one stage to the next.

Let’s quickly take a look at the breakdown of conversational flow and typical sales stages:

The first step in conversational flow is respect and trust. This is extremely important in the N.E.A.T. Selling process. We start our relationships with buyers by earning their trust so that we, in turn, earn the right to ask questions. In the coming chapters we’ll dive more into how we can build respect by creating Respect Contracts, but right now let’s look at the big picture of conversational flow. After we earn respect and trust, we start moving through the sales stages.

  1. Prospecting: Prospects are the people with whom an actual communication exchange has occurred. It can be email, phone, social media, etc. The point is that these people have responded. Even if the answer was “not interested,” they responded and therefore may be someone to contact in the future. When creating pipeline persona definitions, some clients use “suspects” or prospects for Stage 0. These are the people in your Ideal Company Profile and Ideal Persona Profile. Not all suspects are prospects.
  2. Qualifying: Once a prospect has agreed to a first meeting, they are now in the qualifying mode. This means you are confirming they are the right company, the right person, the right department, or they provide Access to Authority as you need it. No opportunity is considered “qualified” until it moves out of this stage and into discovery.
  3. Discovering: This is when you start having real conversations about their actual pains. Where you get them to start telling you about headaches and migraines. Aside from going deep on Need, this is where you are driving to real Economic Impact, Access to Authority, and Timeline. It is not unusual for prospects to stay in discovery for longer periods of time.
  4. Selecting: This is the part of the sales conversation where the prospect tells you that you are shortlisted at minimum. It’s where you know what the competition is, where they confirm the Economic Impact is real, and where worthy conversations about Commercial Terms begin. This is often when you confirm the approval process, start talking about the legal process, and confirm the timeline.
  5. Negotiating: This is where Commercial Terms are finalized. What is the exchange of goods and services worth to them? Having done your discovery on Economic Impact really pays off in this stage.
  6. Closing: This is where you send the contract for redlines, confirm how long the legal process takes, and verify when you can expect to get the signed contract back.

Customer Success

The success of the SaaS (Software as a Service) model, which has annual contracts that renew each year, means greater attention is being paid to retaining current customers. So no book about sales can exist without acknowledging the importance of Customer Success, which is so often overlooked.

Customer Success became a recognized category in sales around 2011. Before this, it was often called Customer Support or Customer Service, and in that iteration was seen more like problem-solving. Traditionally, Customer Success started as the group that onboards new clients. They are the people who walk new users through the activation and use of the product or service. In addition they maintain regular contact to ensure the customer is utilizing the service with best practices in mind.

Since that time, the growth of a SaaS model has relied on the purchase of additional licenses or services during the contract period or at the time of renewal. This is called upselling or cross-selling the customer, which increases your company’s revenue and growth as well as the sales relationship’s “stickiness”—its ability to continue for the long term.

In SaaS, this is often referred to as the “land and expand” model. First you land the account with one group of people using the service, and over time you expand by having them purchase additional licenses to the service and/or additional services, both of which increase the revenue value to your organization.

When a client gets to the end of the annual subscription, the customer has a few choices:

  1. Renew with the same number of licenses.
  2. Renew and add new licenses or additional services or both.
  3. Renew with fewer licenses and/or services.
  4. Churn: not renew anything at all and stop using your service.

So, who is responsible for all of this—onboarding new clients, cross-selling and upselling current clients, and servicing and renewing clients?

There is constant dialogue on who should handle the cross-sell and upsell. Should it be a sales team or the Customer Success team? Oftentimes Customer Success teams are built with individuals who truly love digging in, helping customers achieve their goals, and do not mind handling the challenges a customer may bring up from time to time. And often these people are people-pleasers by nature. This is not a bad thing. It is a very good thing in fact.

People-pleasers need approval from others to sustain their own self-worth and value.

This does not mean these people are less valuable than anyone else. It is simply a part of their makeup. Can they be coached around this? Well, that is up to you, them, and anyone with a psychology degree to delve into.

So, who handles your cross-sell and upsell? It’s simple: it’s the people who are comfortable in the uncomfortable conversations. That does not mean unprofessional. It means they are comfortable talking about things like pricing, contracts, services, handling negotiations, etc. To make it even simpler, the answer will be very clear as you read the sales tactics and strategies in this book. Every tactic and strategy can be used in some form by the Customer Success team as much as they can be used by the sales team. The responsibility lies with the individuals who are the most comfortable following the guidelines provided here. If someone is not comfortable implementing the strategies in this book, they should not be responsible for the upselling and cross-selling initiatives of your organization.

Understanding Exit Criteria

For any sales process to be successful, we must understand and define the conversations and activities that need to happen throughout the process, and what their outcomes really are. These steps are the exit criteria.

On the surface, the goal of having exit criteria is to ensure better accuracy of business forecasting and, therefore, revenue. However, the real value of exit criteria is that they help sales leaders and salespeople understand where they can improve their own skills. The more specific and finite you can make an exit criterion, the easier it will be to identify where to help and coach your sales team and, of course, where your pipeline is the weakest.

Exit criteria must be something tangible that has happened or will happen. Here are a few examples:

From my vantage point, having a defined next step after an activity is always the strongest exit criterion. Sales forecasts are always based on the information we have—and in some cases don’t have. That information is your exit criterion.

We believe that reviewing the sales process and exit criteria at least two times a year ensures the best path for revenue growth. With startups or even mature companies that are rolling out a new product, it can be wise to review your sales process and exit criteria monthly for the first ninety days.

In each stage, there will be exit criteria to leave that stage and move forward, so what are they? What specific activities move the sale forward for your team? Is it having a call scheduled, completing a call, discussing something specific, talking about launch dates? Whatever it is, create exit criteria for every stage of the process.

For a visual display of how we view this, here’s an example we share with clients on building their own sales process (adjust as you see fit):

One final point: as you build a sales process and include exit criteria, it will change over time. Think about it: as you talk to more people, as your products or services change, as the competitive landscape changes, or as economic factors shift, so should your process.

It’s helpful to think about your sales process as a hypothesis that can change based on the collection of additional data. My most successful clients audit their sales process at least once per year, if not twice. And remember, a change in the process is not a change in sales methodology. It simply means you are checking that you are collecting the right data and adjusting exit criteria to fit with a desired outcome, which will improve forecasting and close ratios, reduce sales cycles, and increase contract values.