How to Build A Sales Process That Lands Deals Every Time

To see the sales process in action, let’s take a look at how home manufacturer HomesRUs finds customers and closes deals efficiently.

Background: Construction company HomesRUs launched in 2020, with a simple goal: to sell affordable homes in the Chicagoland area to young families. Their homes typically take three months to build, and early estimates show they will cost between $200,000 and $500,000.

With construction on their first homes underway, HomesRUs onboards an eager young rep, Emily, to start selling. Unfortunately, there’s no sales process in place and Emily doesn’t know much about the company. Emily has experience selling, however, so starts building out the process she needs to land her first sales.

Company and product research: On her first day, Emily meets with the construction lead and the CFO. She asks specific questions about how the homes are designed, what materials are used in the building process, where the homes will be built, and how the company determines initial pricing. She learns that one of the company’s key differentiators is its American-made materials.

Prospect research: With a better understanding of the company and its product, Emily then sits down to map out what she knows about her ideal prospect. She wants to target young families, and given mortgage rates, aims for those with a household income of about $100,000. She also reaches out to a couple of local real estate agents to ask about their client base — specifically, what they look for in a new home, what their challenges are, and where they typically look for homes.

Prospecting: Emily now knows enough to start looking for prospects. She joins some local real estate community groups, real estate-related Reddit threads, and LinkedIn groups used by her target buyer. She also plans a few real estate “get to know you” events at local clothing and home goods stores where she knows her ideal buyer likes to shop.

Qualification and discovery: With a few prospects in hand from searches and events, Emily reaches out. She starts by offering free packets of information on the local real estate market and the home-buying process — must-have information for new homeowners. She then asks for a quick call to talk about what her prospects are looking for and how she can help. She learns some of them are targeting homes at a much lower price point, so removes them from her prospecting list.

Sales call: For her best-fit prospects, Emily suggests meeting in person to tour one of the model homes and talk through features, price, availability, and timing. To make the home more alluring, she makes sure it’s staged with freshly baked cookies in the kitchen (chocolate chip, of course). After several successful walk-throughs, only one of her prospects is keen to move ahead right away. The others have some concerns about price and ask for more time to think about the opportunity.

Follow up: A day after her home tours, Emily follows up with each one of her best-fit prospects to let them know what the next steps are, including home inspection and the loan application. For those who were on the fence about a purchase, she lets them know she’ll follow up in a few months to see how they feel about moving ahead.

Close: Lucky for Emily, her most engaged prospect agrees to buy. Yay! She sets up the home inspection and helps the customer file all of the paperwork for the loan and purchase. As a thank you, she sends the buyer a gift basket filled with goodies for their new home.

Nurture: Emily sends the new homeowners an email a few weeks after the sale to check in. She makes sure the home meets their expectations and they haven’t seen any design or structural issues. She also checks to ensure all the final steps of the sale — loan paperwork, and so on — were wrapped up without issue. When she hears how happy the customer is, she asks for a referral, offering a $1,000 incentive for every new customer they bring to HomesRUs.

Not every sales process will look the one Emily and HomesRUs use, of course, but the basic flow is the same. Make sure you have ample information to find the right buyer, then deliver value throughout the process to make the close easy.

Research is key to successful sales. When done correctly, it allows you to speak confidently about what you’re selling and what problems it solves. When done poorly — or not at all — prospects lose confidence in your product and business.

Take the time to understand both what you’re selling and your target audience before you ever make a sales call. Not only will you avoid embarrassing fumbles, but you’ll be able to address unique problems and value propositions in your prospect communications.

Many reps think a qualifying call is sufficient background to pick out the best prospects on their list. In most cases, however, this call is very high level and doesn’t adequately paint the picture of a prospect’s needs.

Barnes calls this out as a common issue with new reps and recommends a separate call for discovery. “Take the time to hear about [your prospects’] pain points in-depth. Only when you fully understand these pain points can you offer a solution.”

Many eager salespeople are so focused on quotas and commissions that they forget the qualifying and discovery calls and launch straight into the sales pitch. The result is often a dead end — the unvetted prospect has little interest, insufficient budget, or is not empowered to make buying decisions.

Take the time to learn about your prospect’s alignment with your products before a sales call and you’ll dramatically increase your chances of closing a deal.

It’s common for reps to lead a sales call touting product features. The problem is, prospects aren’t looking for features. They’re looking for solutions and value.

As Executive Sales Coach Jay Abraham advises, “Sell the benefit, not the company or the product. People buy results, not features.”

Laser-focused on closing deals, reps can come across as pushy. Nobody wants to make a buying decision under pressure.

Don’t think of your prospect as a potential client. Think of them as a friend. Listen to their problems with empathy. It builds trust and loyalty, which make a purchase decision easier.

Constant talking is often cited as the number-one mistake salespeople make. It alienates prospects and scuttles once-promising deals. In fact, many studies have demonstrated the negative impact of talking more than listening during sales calls. The takeaway is the same: Reps who consistently close deals listen more than they talk.

The golden ratio is hard to pin down, but many experts recommend a 60/40 split in favor of listening. This gives reps enough time to share value-based insights while making sure the prospect is heard.

There are countless potential objections to a sale: cost, bad timing, insufficient need, lack of product functionality, and so on. While these will vary depending on the prospect, they’re often easy to anticipate. Unfortunately, many reps struggle to close sales due to common objections they don’t know how to overcome.

The best solution is to map out all likely prospect objections before you make your pitch. Then, use Barnes’ “3 Fs Formula” along with your product and prospect research to prepare empathetic and impactful responses.

In the era of virtual selling, sales leader and consultant Larry Long Jr. notes reps struggle to keep calls short enough to retain prospects’ attention. The result, he says, is poor engagement and waning product interest.

Fortunately, the solution is easy: Keep your calls (in-person or virtual) to 30 minutes max. This forces you to avoid tangents and focus on sales-critical information.

Building a sales process isn’t a “one and done” effort. According to longtime consultant and sales coach Scott Leese, you should revisit your process every six months to ensure there are no bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or dated guidance. A lot of this work is the responsibility of sales managers or sales operations leads, but reps should feel empowered to provide feedback on goal metrics, target buyer personas, their tech stack, and possible process bottlenecks.

Here’s how to get started:

Building a sales process isn’t a “one and done” effort. According to longtime consultant and sales coach Scott Leese➚, you should revisit your process every six months to ensure there are no bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or dated guidance. A lot of this work is the responsibility of sales managers or sales operations leads, but reps should feel empowered to provide feedback on goal metrics, target buyer personas, their tech stack, and possible process bottlenecks.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Examine your performance against goal metrics.

Several steps in the sales process have performance metrics associated with them to ensure you keep deals flowing and, ultimately, hit sales goals. The most commonly tracked ones are: the number of prospects added to each rep’s pipeline in a given period, the number of sales calls made, the number of deals won, and, to a lesser extent, the number of upsells and cross-sells.

During your biannual review, identify how your performance compares to goal metrics. If there are certain areas where you’re falling behind, take a close look at the messaging and process in that area. Determine potential areas for improvement by asking:

• Is the product messaging I’m using dated or inaccurate?
• Does my outreach seem out of touch?
• Am I taking too long to complete tasks?
• Are there obstacles to completing tasks in this step?

When you have identified possible areas for improvement, flag them with your manager or sales ops lead for review. Make sure you map out a plan for updating your sales process to address problem areas, with next steps and action items clearly outlined. Aim to complete these action items one to two weeks after your review.

2. Review your target buyer persona.

Your ideal prospect will likely change as the market and your products change. Pull up your buyer persona (created in step 2) and make sure that it makes sense for your current prospecting efforts. You can use the questions you asked when creating your buyer persona to see if it still fits:

• What unique needs does my product or service address, and who has these needs?
• What are the characteristics and challenges of prospects targeted by my competitors?
• Where do my ideal prospects live and how do they engage with businesses like mine?

If your answers don’t align with the buyer persona as it stands, bring it to the attention of your sales ops team or sales leader and ask them to consider making updates.

3. Re-evaluate your tech stack.

According to the State of Sales Report, almost two-thirds of sales reps report being overwhelmed by too many tools. This can lead to a lot of time wasted on redundant data entry, and increases the chances for human error.

To avoid these pitfalls, audit your sales tools. Do they require a lot of data entry that takes you away from critical sales conversations? Are there some you would consider unnecessary or unhelpful? (Here’s a helpful guide for completing a comprehensive audit.)

It’s also important to examine naming conventions and language used in your technology. When systems are set up piecemeal or by different teams, there can be language differences that cause confusion. Is there a consistent taxonomy used across all reps and pipelines for stages and deal records in your CRM, or is naming different for different team members? Are you confused by labels, tags, or instructions?

If you’re seeing productivity obstacles here, surface them with your manager or sales ops team. Wherever possible, use concrete examples to show how these issues are negatively impacting your sales.

4. Identify possible process bottlenecks.

Part of the benefit of sales process reviews is identifying areas to improve overall efficiency, Leese says. Don’t be afraid to dig into the roots of your process to see what needs to be uprooted. It’s possible that long-standing steps are actually dragging down performance.

Start by looking at the numbers. Pull up your CRM analytics tool to look at three key metrics, which gauge prospect engagement in each sales process step: average time in each step, average number of prospects in one step at the same time, and overall win rate.

First question to ask: How do these metrics compare to the previous six months? If performance is up, you’re making strides toward greater efficiency. If performance is down, look for the root cause by asking:

• Do you have clear exit criteria in place for each step of the sales process?
• Where are prospects getting stuck?
• Based on where prospects stall in the sales process, are there unnecessary steps?
• Is your sales process missing a critical step, like discovery or qualification?
• Do you need additional or better resources to successfully complete each step?

When you have a better sense of problem areas in your sales process, you can bring them to the attention of your sales operations lead. As always, bring evidence to support your conclusion and recommend a potential change to address the problems you uncovered.

5. Ask for enablement updates.

While enablement program maintenance is the purview of sales ops leaders, reps can ask their managers for additional or updated enablement at any time — especially after the biannual sales process review. Changes should be updated in training materials, and these changes should be communicated to the entire team. The more up-to-date your enablement is, the easier it will be for you to sell — and hit those sales targets.