Trust the Sales Process. Trust Your People.

You have to trust your sales process.

You have to trust that by reverse-engineering how you have value-creating conversations, how you generate all the necessary outcomes between target and close, and how you gain the necessary commitments you need, your process provides you with the best possible chance of creating and winning an opportunity.

When you decide to skip some of those conversations, forego the outcomes you need, and fail to gain the necessary commitments, you are decreasing the likelihood of winning that opportunity. And you are selling poorly.

Trust the Process

If the sales leadership team doesn’t trust the process, neither will the sales force. If you are a sales leader and you don’t strongly commit to the process, neither will your team. If you install a process and aren’t engaged in ensuring that process is working, then you will never trust the process, and neither will your managers, nor will your sales force.

• You have to trust that the process outlines the best and most likely path from target to close.
• You have to trust that the outcomes that are necessary at each stage are the right outcomes, and that they create value for your prospective clients and position you to win.
• You have to trust that the commitments you need as you move along the path are the right commitments.

If you don’t trust that the process is the right process or that it is going to position you to sell effectively, win or lose, change the process. But not enforcing the process is the same as not having a process. Without a process, you are effectively allowing your sales force to wing it and hope for the best.

Trust Your People

You also have to trust your people.

A sales process is a roadmap. It doesn’t constrain the salesperson’s resourcefulness or their creativity. Like any map, there are times when it doesn’t resemble the terrain, and the salesperson must call on their initiative and creativity to move things forward.

There is no end to the need for creativity when it comes to achieving the outcomes the process dictates, for collaborating with your dream client around the right solution, or for developing powerful questions and dialogue that move deals forward. But all of that exists inside the framework of the sales process.

You can only trust your people to be creative within the framework of the process if you actually trust the process.