Knowing Your Sales Process: Part 1 Your Customers

This is an area where a lot of people leave money on the table. They call and ask for a promotional item. They don’t care what it is as long as it’s branded and within budget and arrives on time.

This is a waste and I tell them so.

If you want your promotional marketing pieces to have more bang for your buck you need to tie them into your sales process or funnel.

This concept is very important to getting the most return on your investment so stick close and listen up. It’s so important I broke the blog post into two parts. The first piece is about knowing your ideal customer.

Who Are You Trying to Motivate?

Knowing the typical steps a person takes from prospect to customer will help you better understand how to get more customers. But before you know their steps, you must figure out who they are. It’s possible you have several kinds of buyers or customers. If that’s the case, each may have different sales cycles.

Let’s examine your sales process/cycle for your (most) typical customer. If you don’t have one documented, ask yourself the following questions:

• How do most of my customers find me?
• Who are these people (buyer persona)? What do they have in common?
• How many touches does it take to win them over? Is my sales cycle a long one or a short one?
• How much money do they spend on average with me?
• Is there the potential for repeat business?

The answers to these basic questions will help you formulate a road map for your sales success.

For instance, let’s say you sell software for human resources. Your software is costly, with a long sales cycle. You target companies with an annual revenue of 5 million+.

The average customer spends $700 per month and never comes to your office. You’re in the cloud and all transactions are handled online with a salesperson who demonstrates the software virtually.

This customer looks very different than a beachside souvenir shop where most business is done by price. The buying cycle is minimal, a couple minutes in the store, and repeat business is probably not an end goal.

Before we move onto part 2 of this blog – Tying your Promotional Item into your Sales Cycle – take a moment to sketch out your buyer personas based on the questions above. You’ll want them for part 2.