Sales Process Flow Chart
Sales Process Flow Chart For Outbound Appointment Setting
Selling is a process.
Outbound selling requires a process.
Cold outreach is only one step in the sales process. It’s the most challenging step.
Convincing a cold prospect to take call number one is the biggest challenge in outbound sales. To tackle this huge challenge, we often rely on the least experienced, lowest paid employees in our business. A telemarketer (or sales development representative) often makes less than $50,000 per year (and sometimes much less), which naturally makes it a high turnover role.
Can Process Help In High Turnover Roles?
Think about the first job you held as a student. Did you work at a fast-food restaurant? A retail store? These are both high-turnover roles. Now think about the training you received for those roles. How did you learn to cook fries while simultaneously serving customers? How did you learn to upsell a customer who came in to buy a pair of jeans?
Process.
Process enables us to hire for attitude and train for skill.
The better your process, the faster you can have an employee performing.
The faster your employee performs, the sooner they’re helping produce revenue for you.
When you have well-defined process, churn hurts you less – your employees have paid for themselves by producing revenue equivalent to your investment in them prior to their leaving the role.
The faster you can train, the sooner your employee can perform, and churn has less impact on your business.
A Well Defined Process Can Reduce Labor Costs
Often when an employee accepts a role that we may define as “less desirable”, they are at the beginning of their career, or they’re not looking for a career at all. They want a J-O-B, and one is as good as the other.
There’s nothing wrong with not living to work, lots of people work to live. Many people opt-out of climbing corporate ladders, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The more we respect candidates who are working to pay their bills, the more diverse our workforce becomes.
Often, employers preparing to make their first hire will turn down excellent entry-level candidates for sales roles because they don’t have the ability to train a new employee with no experience.
Why?
They don’t have a process that allows them to hire entry level, inexperienced employees. Instead of making a one-time investment in developing process and learning how to train to that process, they choose instead to make significant investments in hiring employees with more experience. They expect that an experienced employee will be able to “hit the ground running”, and “save them time”.
The employer doesn’t develop a training program, they choose not to invest in creating a process.
Then they’re disappointed when the larger investment made in the higher-paid employee doesn’t pay off, and surprised when that employee doesn’t perform at the level we expected based on the salary offered.
So what happens then?
They chalk it up to a failure on the part of the employee. Now a decision is made to hire another employee – an even higher paid employee with even more experience.
The employee fails. The employer fails. The cycle continues. It’s an expensive cycle.
A lack of experience isn’t the problem. A lack of process is.
At this point, the employer has burned an entire year of performance, and potentially over $100,000 in labor expenses that resulted in nothing.
A Lack of Sales Process Is Expensive
This is especially true in sales. Great sales reps get great by following a process. The process that their last employer spent hours training them to may not translate to your business. In the absence of your process, that sales rep will follow their own. The most toxic phrase in a sales organization is: “Well, in my last job we…”
Imagine the year long fiasco described above. (It’s not rare – it happens more often than it doesn’t to small business owners that don’t invest in process!) Not only have you lost the money you invested in salaries, you’ve lost an entire year of pipeline. Every month of burned pipeline costs an organization a quarter’s worth of qualified “at-bats”. A year of lost pipeline can equal four years of lost opportunities. It’s not just the salary – the opportunity cost of poor sales process is an even bigger loss than the original salary investment.
Great Sales Process = Higher Margins
With a well-defined process in place, you can hire less expensive resources that will perform at higher levels than experienced resources with no process to follow. Instead of investing $30,000 more (and potentially recruiting fees) hiring an experienced employee, you can invest in creating a process that you’ll use with all new hires.
Building a process can pay for itself in just one hire, and for larger organizations, it can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in labor costs annually. Imagine how you could deploy those resources?
Bonuses, additional sales team members, better tools, better leads…
Or you can pocket the margin and invest in your retirement. Either way, you win.
Process And Outbound Sales
Training outbound sales reps is much easier with a defined process.
The process you follow can be as simple as five repeatable steps, or as complex as a sales playbook.
I’m an advocate for “KISS” when it comes to building a sales process.
“Keep It Super Simple.”
That’s one of the reasons I make a sales process flow chart for clients that hire me to change, fix or improve on their sales process. A sales process flow chart gives a visual step-by-step example of what to do next in most of the situations you or your sales team will find themselves in when using an outbound sales strategy.
Use A Visual Sales Process Flow Chart With Your Sales Playbook
The easiest way to build a sales process is to start with a simple, visual sales process flow chart.
You can pin it to wall. You can create one online and hyper-link to the next step in the process.
Companies using expensive CRM systems can build their process right into their CRM – complete with scripts and next steps for each part of the flow chart.
Ready to hire your first sales rep? Start with a sales process flow chart. Then build your process step-by-step by following the flow chart.
We use a process-based CRM solution called Membrain. Our sales process is built right into the system, and has helpful checklists, video tutorials, templates and anything else a brand-new employee would need to use to follow our process exactly – from that very first phone call to a closed deal.
Richardson & Richardson can help you build your sales process, starting with a simple visual sales process flow chart.
If you’re interested in receiving a sample outbound sales process flow chart that you can customize to meet your companies sales requirements, subscribe to our opt-in only newsletter – we’ll be sending it out to subscribers this month.
Interested in building a custom sales process flow chart?
Schedule time with Carrie or Ian to discuss your requirements.
Interested in on-demand sales process training for your IT company?
Buy the Richardson & Richardson On-Demand Sales Training Program here!
Share this Post
