Importance of a Sales Process
Importance of a Sales Process for your Dealership
The Challenges of Sales
Let’s face it: even at the height of the digital revolution, people are still impossible to reach!
Tracking leads, converting them into prospects and progressing them into clients can seem nearly impossible without an effective and rock-solid sales process. Without a sales process, your team is more likely to hit roadblocks such as customer uncertainty, poor time management, and communication stalls.
Your customer vetting process is just as, if not even more, important than your closing process. Tracking your customers accurately gives you visibility into which areas you can leverage later in the sales process that help your dealership stand out from the others. Understanding who you’re connecting with and ensuring that you can match and exceed their needs and expectations helps place your sales team in a positive position.
Research from HubSpot shows that organizations with a clearly defined sales process often improve close rates and forecasting accuracy because every opportunity follows a consistent path through the pipeline.
In this blog post, we’ll explore why a formal sales process matters for outdoor power equipment dealerships, how it can help increase revenue and how you can build an effective sales process for your team.
Click to jump ahead:
- Why Do I Need a Formal Sales Process at My Dealership?
- How Can I Generate More Revenue with the Sales Process?
- How to Build a Sales Process
Why Do I Need a Formal Sales Process at My Dealership?
A formal sales process allows your team to strategically plan how you approach potential customers. When done properly, you can maximize your chances of closing a sale while also cutting down your sales turnaround time while boosting the quality of your sales.
Formal sales processes keep your sales team on track. Creating this framework helps your team understand your dealership’s best practices and leverage techniques that have worked best in the past. Your team can then contribute to this process, adjusting as needed to boost the whole team’s success rate.
Once established, your sales process can be used to train new members, fortify your team, and, in turn, boost your dealership’s profitability.
How Can I Generate More Revenue with the Sales Process?
Your sales process affects more than just your sales team. Your entire dealership can reference your sales process when evaluating results. The metrics you can pull from your sales process help your sales managers track and analyze performance. Having this visibility protects your dealership from making the same costly decisions in the future. Using tools like TargetCRM help track these metrics automatically while organizing customer interactions and sales opportunities.
How to Build a Sales Process
The first step to creating an effective sales process is research. Look both internally and externally for any information that will help you establish what works best for your dealership.
Many CRM and sales platforms outline similar frameworks for building repeatable sales systems. For example, HubSpot provides guidance on how to design and manage a structured sales pipeline.
Your sales process should be dynamic and flexible, leaving room for new strategies while still providing a solid foundation for your team. You can easily do this using TargetCRM with the process below!
Determine Your Audience
Start by figuring out what your potential customers need by asking the following questions:
- Who are your customers?
- What do they need from you, and can you provide it?
- How will you attract customers?
- What will you do to progress forward?
- What is your value proposition?
Qualify Leads
After establishing your prospects, move on to qualify your leads with these questions:
- What problem are they trying to solve?
- What competitors are they currently using or exploring?
The best way to qualify leads is through a discovery call. This call or meeting can help determine if a customer is the right fit. You can ask important questions that help you determine your customers’ budget, stakeholders, needs, and time period. To do this, we recommend using the BANT method:
- Budget – How much is the prospect willing and able to spend?
- Authority – Who are the decision makers in this sale? Who makes the ultimate decision?
- Need – Does the prospect have a true need for my product?
- Timeline – How much time will the prospect need to make a purchasing decision?
You can learn more about lead qualification best practices in this guide from Salesforce.
Build Your Sales Process
Using the information found during your qualifying process, you can then determine the best route for your sales process. This process will look different depending on what your customer needs.
Here are a few essentials that you should consider when doing this:
- Customer information: Name, History, Methods of contact.
- That the customer is looking to purchase: This can be added to the deal title, so it is easier to find in the future.
- Amount: How much the customer is willing to pay or how much their request will cost.
- Time tracker: How long should the deal take vs how long it does.
- Recommended sales pipeline: Which department is responsible for this deal and how will they conduct the sale.
- Assignment: Who is responsible for the current task.
Tip: With TargetCRM you can assign tasks directly to the user and automatically track their progress in the system.
As the deal progresses, you can add more details about the sale to better track the process. It is important to stay informed during this stage in the process. We recommend using a management tool such as Ideal’s dealership management software to help organize and track your prospect communications. With Ideal, you can input the previous information and track your sales process through your system.
Closing the Deal
At some point, the deal you’re working on will come to a close.
If the sale is successful, we will close the deal and any remaining tasks related to this deal. That way, we are not trying to organize financing for someone who has already bought their equipment and gone home.
If things do not go quite so nicely, the customer may not end up buying anything from us. In that case, we will mark this as a lost sale. When marking a deal as lost, it is important to include the reason and enter notes explaining why the customer did not buy from us. This way, we can review later and identify business patterns.
Lastly, sometimes the deal just goes stale. You cannot get the customer on the phone, or they have been teasing you for weeks. If the customer comes back and decides to buy, great. But their deal is no longer considered in progress. That’s when you archive the deal. This saves everything as it is now, and you can find and reactivate the deal later.
Continue to build your customer relationships
No matter what the outcome of the deal, it is important to recognize that the customer relationship has only begun.
Now it’s time to pass along the information you collected to your marketing team so they can nurture the customer relationship and promote future sales opportunities.
Tip: We recommend using a tool like TargetCRM to help strengthen this relationship without detracting from valuable operational time.