If you’re in business, you need to understand the sales process. When you understand the sales process, you can move from being a content consumer to selling your content in the online coaching space. There’s a lot of talk about promotional cycles and business cycles.
Still, I find there’s not a lot of talk about the sales cycle, which is one of the most critical components of a business.
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Here are five steps you need to know to implement an efficient sales process to understand the process better and drive home more sales and profitability in your business.
Why You Need a Sales Process
You may ask yourself, what is a sales process, and why do you need one?
A sales process is a system to move leads through that eventually lead to sales. You need a sales process because, without a sales process, you are leaving hot leads out to dry and leaving big money and more profitability on the table.
In addition, having a sales process is an essential component of your business cycle in addition to promotions, networking, and other marketing you do daily to get the word out about your company. Of course, we are all familiar with the business cycle’s digital marketing components, such as email marketing and social media. Still, you also need a sales process as a critical part of your business cycle to have a successful business model. And this is where many entrepreneurs are dropping the ball in the online coaching space and why they’re leaving so much money on the table. Many online coaches and entrepreneurs don’t understand the sales process or the skills required in each sales process step.
Sales Process Step #1: Engage!
Step number one is to engage with your leads, and you can engage in one of two ways.
First, a lead can come to you, which is an inbound lead. The other way to capture a lead is to find a new lead in the marketplace yourself. That’s an outbound lead, and most businesses have a combination of inbound and outbound leads.
Step #2: Educate Your Leads and Prospects
Step two of a sales process is to educate your new prospective leads. This is what I call the qualifying and booking a call phase.
In your qualifying call (you can also call this your discovery call), you and the leaders discuss how you can solve their pain points.
As a result, your prospect can get clarity on how they can utilize your services to solve their problem.
Step #3 Booking a Closing Call
When you book a closing call, a demo, or a presentation, you’re speaking with your potential client about your products or services. You’re showing your lead how you can solve their problem. You’ll need to utilize several skill sets for step three, and you’ll also need to understand and implement pre-close intentions.
In this phase, you’ll want to effectively present offers and know how to handle objections. In addition, you’ll want to understand closing.
Step #4: Evaluate
Now evaluate the follow-up to step three because you’re not gonna close to everyone you pitch to on a sales call. That’s why you always need a thoroughly packed pipeline in phase one, which is the engaging step. You want to make sure that you stay top of mind for people. This is where your digital marketing process and plan come into play.
So, if someone didn’t buy from you by step four, you need to find out why. Were they not convinced by the product? Were they not convinced by you? Did they think you weren’t able to solve their problem?
Step #5: Endorse
Finally, the last part of a sales process is called endorse. And more often than not, this part of the sales process is neglected.
I know I’ve neglected this part of the process in the past, and many of my colleagues have also neglected the endorsing phase. For the endorsing phase, you are reaching out to people who’ve already hired your service to upsell them and for referrals to their network.
Each client should be able to send you about three to five referrals. When you ask your clients to send referrals, closing more business is easier as you’re not stomping the pavement – your satisfied clients are doing it for your business!
In addition, asking your clients for referrals is the most accessible money. Because if a paid client has received results, they’re likely to rebuy your services ad refer you to someone in their network who needs your services. However, if you don’t have a process or system for referrals from your clients, which we call endorse, if that’s not a part of your sales system, then you’re gonna lose out on easy leads and sales.
These are the five parts of a sales process. Let me know which parts you’ve learned about and will implement, especially ones you’ve neglected in your sales process.
And if you want more help to gain clarity on how to create your sales process, take us up on our sales diagnostic! We can help you figure out which step to take next in our 15-minute diagnostic call. Then, on your call, we can figure out where the holes are in your business and how to fix them in the next 60 days.
Resources that are mentioned or add value to this episode:
- Get the media coverage your business deserves with the 365 Media Pitch System
- Free Facebook Group: High Ticket Sales For Women Coaches and Course Creators
- Persuade To Profit
- Make Money Your Honey Book
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