We all enjoy coming up with solutions. Unfortunately, if the solution needs to be internalized by a group of people to improve team execution, it can be a frustrating and time-consuming effort to get everyone on board.

Let’s say you have clearly identified that a process inefficiency is causing a bottleneck in sales productivity, and have built a solid process to address the issue. You’ve got the green light from senior management, they think it looks fantastic and can’t wait to see the impact it has.

Now, the real work begins – communicating the value of the process to your sales team and convincing them to implement it in their day-to-day work. Not as easy as it may sound.

Well, in this post I hope to relieve you of at least some of the stress that comes with sales process adoption by highlighting 9 tried and tested tips that will address 2 key obstacles you’ll face:

1. Convincing sales reps that the process works and helps them achieve their sales goals.
2. Providing the tools that enable reps to easily integrate the process into their day-to-day activities.

Successfully tick both those boxes, and you will be well on your way.

Let’s get started.

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Retaining valuable customers is a necessity

In one of her hit songs, Adele famously sings the words “Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead”.

Minus the sentimental value, this also applies to the world of business. It is a simple reality that customers come and go and sometimes there is nothing you can do about it.

On the other hand, sometimes it lasts. Sometimes you can retain a customer for a long period of time and build a fruitful, trusting relationship that enables both of you to be more successful.

There has been some fascinating research done in recent years to highlight just how important it is to keep your customers happy.

Beyond the well-known Pareto principle that states 80% of a company’s revenue comes from 20% of its customers, Harvard Business School Professor, Sunil Gupta, has provided further evidence to show the importance of retaining customers that provide high levels of profitability.

Furthermore, Bain & Company have found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%, and it is widely agreed upon in the SaaS world that the cost of acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5-25% more expensive than retaining an existing one.

Needless to say, making a concerted effort to retain your customers is just as, if not more important than acquiring new ones.

Execute account management processes flawlessly

Retaining customers, particularly high-value customers, is nothing short of essential for the growth of SaaS and other subscription-based companies, and to do so requires excellent account management.

That’s why we’ve gone ahead and created this set of checklists; to help you flawlessly execute various processes from conducting a thorough analysis of your competitors to the daunting task of preventing a valuable customer from churning.

Ever found yourself struggling with the sales-to-service handoff process or upselling? We’ve got those covered, too.

In this post, I’m going to provide a brief outline of each checklist and summarize why it’s a good idea to integrate them into your account management processes.

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There’s only so many times you can read “the button is red which makes it stand out” before getting frustrated.

“Yes,” I thought, “but what about everything else? Why is this call to action example where it is? Why isn’t it a circle?”

“What is this CTA designed to do, and how does it achieve this?”

I couldn’t find an easy answer to these questions, and that had to change. That’s why this post will take apart 24 CTAs in detail. No one-sentence summaries and vague details.

From landing pages to supermarket signs, you’ll see how these calls to action may play a larger part in the company’s strategy, how they are set up to achieve this, and therefore how to apply the lesson from each to your own.

Let’s begin.

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Sales is one of the core aspects of how a business functions.

Without sales, your brilliant product will just sit there, neglected and unused.

But no one is born as a brilliant salesperson, just as no one is born with an innate knowledge of how to run an effective outbound strategy.

We learn these things on the way. A lot of the time, we learn from the sales jobs we’ve had. But we shouldn’t limit ourselves to that. Why not learn from the best salespeople, the highest performing companies, and the extreme examples?

In this Process Street article, we’re bringing expertise galore to your bookshelf or Kindle. We’ll go through our 7 key recommended reads, and follow that with 38 more sales books to satisfy your niche, industry, or needs.

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Building an initial sales approach is something loads of us have attempted to do at some point or other.

Sales ends up being one of the key ways companies grow and scale. We all know this.

But there’s a big difference between doing effective outreach for your startup on a high-touch basis where you’re still understanding customer needs and figuring out approaches, and turning this knowledge into a sales machine with a full sales team that can operate in a financially efficient way.

Understanding yourself in the market and growing to be the company you want to be require different slightly strategies.

This growth from tiny solopreneur kind of structures to managing teams with effective documented practices is what this article will be all about!

In this Process Street article, we’re going to take a look into some expert insights from Close.io‘s recent webinar with their CEO Steli Efti, Process Street’s CEO Vinay Patankar, PandaDoc‘s Director of Inside Sales Mike Paladino, and Groove‘s VP of Sales Mike Sutherland.

We’re going to pull out the key questions to help scale your sales in a way that works:

• What do you want to scale?
• Is now a good time to scale?
• How do you build a process for scaling?
• How do you get a sales teams to follow the process?
• When and how do I add people to a sales team?

And finally, we’ll give you 10 free process templates for different areas of sales for you to start using in your business today.

You can watch the whole webinar here: How to build a scalable sales process (Q&A webinar)

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Throughout a customer lifecycle, it is important to take opportunities when they present themselves.

One aspect which many SaaS companies will be familiar with is the ongoing attempt to upgrade customers to the next level of billing.

The core method of achieving this is to add features and improve your product.

This provides provides greater value for the client and gives them more reasons to consider purchasing your services – resulting in an upsell which works for both parties.

I imagine most of you reading have bought something from Amazon at some point in time. Yet when Amazon offer a more premium delivery service with access to films and television shows many of you will have gone from occasionally using Amazon for purchases to being fully fledged Prime users!

Amazon offered greater value and you thought it was worth paying for. You were upsold.

But importantly, both you and Amazon came out of the deal as winners!

In this article, we’ll look at how different companies have utilized upselling to drive their business forward, and try to learn a little something from each.

Then we’ll take a more in depth look at how Process Street upsells its customers, and the importance of seeing this as a company wide effort rather than small aspect of sales.

At the end of the article, we’ll give you a free Process Street process template you can use in your business for upselling customers. This process is geared to be run by a member of the sales team to try to upsell a valuable client, and close the deal.

Checkout the snapshot below!

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Born in 1970, sales operations was originally described as “all the nasty number things that you don’t want to do, but need to do to make a great sales force”.

Sales is moving from paper rolodexes into the world of AI, automation and cloud computing. With it comes more nasty number things than ever before, making operations staff a vital part of the sales team.

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Some people seem like naturals when it comes to sales. Their smooth talking and deep product knowledge entices customers and makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Source

A high performing sales person is a huge asset to a company, and they’re often paid very well as a reward!

• Maybe you want to start a new business and need to jump into the sales role to get your fledgling startup off the ground?
• Maybe you want to build a sales team to crush sales goals while you focus on your specialty?
• Or maybe you just want to get into sales as a career and need to know how to get up to speed fast?

Well, in this Process Street article we’ll cover solutions to each of these conundrums. We’ll look at:

1. How Salesforce hit their sales goals
2. 10 top tips the sales experts have for a beginner
3. How Close.io CEO Steli Efti builds outbound sales teams
4. What steps you need to take to build sales processes (with a load of premade templates to help you get started!)

“A goal properly set is halfway reached.” – Legendary sales guru, Zig Ziglar.

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It’s impossible to run a successful business without taking the time to track your core business metrics.

If you don’t, then good luck knowing:

• How much pure profit you’re earning
• Where costs can be cut
• Whether you’re selling enough
• How much debt you have
• Whether you’ll be bankrupt next quarter

Having said that, where do you start? There are so many metrics you could be tracking that it’s easy to get stuck tracking and recording everything rather than analyzing and acting on your data.

That’s why I’ve collected 53 core business metrics right here to get you started. Stop wasting time wondering what to track or flicking between 20 different posts going over five stats each – every metric here comes with a brief description and formula or method for easily tracking it.

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You wouldn’t implement an unproven strategy based on gut feeling alone, would you?

I hope not.

All good strategies are based on research, and your sales management should be no different.

Thankfully, organizations like Salesforce, Brainshark, and SPI regularly publish vital reports packed with trends, predictions, and statistics that will help you hit your targets by offering information on the changing state of B2B sales.

These reports are a must-read for sales executives that don’t want to be left in the dust, or confused by the fact that their proven strategy formed in 1998 isn’t working any more.

But, there’s always a problem with stats…

Facts and figures aren’t much use unless you act on them, and in this post we’ve tried to make that easy. Alongside the statistics, you’ll find pre-made sales processes you can use in your own organization.

Bookmark this list, and take a look next time you’re making improvements to your B2B sales management strategy.

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