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SALES PROCESS
A sales process is a systematic methodology for performing product or service sales. The reasons for having a sales process include seller and buyer risk management, achieving standardized customer interaction in sales and scalable revenue generation.
Specific steps in sales processes vary from company to company but generally include the following steps:
- Sales lead
- Qualified prospect
- Need identification
- Proposal
- Closing
- Deal Transaction
From a seller's point of view, a sales process mediates risk by stage-gating deals based on collection of information or execution of procedures that gate movement to the next step. This controls seller resource expenditure on non-performing deals. Ideally this also prevents buyers from purchasing products they don't need though such a benefit requires ethical intentions by the seller. Because of the uncertainty of this assurance, buyers often have a buying or purchasing process.
Sales processes are generally more common for companies that either have large revenue risks that require systematic assurance of revenue generation and/or those that choose to use a more consultative sales approach (e.g. Saturn, IBM, Hewlett-Packard).
Strictly even an effective ad hoc or retail sales process can be described by steps of an ideal sales process though some of the steps may be executed quickly. Often a bad sales experience can be analyzed and shown to have skipped key steps. This is where a good sales processes mediate risk for both buyer and seller.
Many companies develop their own sales process; however, off the shelf versions are available from companies such as Huthwaite International and Miller Heiman. These provide a customisable process and a set of electronic tools that can be freestanding or can be integrated if required with the company's CRM or opportunity management system.
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