Ask any salesperson and they’ll tell you: “It’s all about relationships.” We agree. But it’s not just a sales rep’s relationships with contacts, accounts, and prospects. It’s about a relationship to systems, best practices, and tools like quoting software.
The basics of being a good salesperson
Frankly, there are too many to detail in a single blog and you’ll find wildly different opinions on just about every website and in every book. There are some agreed-upon basics, though:
You have to know your products and believe in them: it’s not enough to just know pricing and features. You have to understand and be able to speak to, the benefits your customers will enjoy.
You need people skills: active listening, geniality, personalization of every customer contact (this goes all the way back to Dale Carnegie).
You have to have an ego. According to The Harvard Business Review, “a good salesman [has] a particular kind of ego drive that makes him want and need to make the sale in a personal or ego way, not merely for the money to be gained.” I.e., you take closing as a victory, not just a paycheck.
The preceding basics of being a good salesman are, for the most part, all about personality (psychology, even). But workflow management and technology also play a role, and that’s in creating repeatable processes that help you build on success.
And here’s where we pivot to what we do here at IQX, which is providing a sales quoting software that enables and fuels repeatability. That applies to repeating your successes and learning from — but absolutely NOT repeating — failures.
A repeatable sales process (with a focus on closing)
We’re simply going to assume you’re tracking what you do in some way, that when leads arrive they don’t simply go into a safe (like the Glengarry leads), and that progress isn’t being tracked on Post-Its or a whiteboard. I.e., we’re assuming you’re using a CRM or at least a spreadsheet to keep track of where any given sale is in the process.
In most cases, the sales process is funnel-shaped, with a shotgun approach at the top (email blasts, cold calls, names without job titles, etc.) refined into a sniper shot at the bottom (qualified leads, pain points understood, demos given, etc.). In ALL cases, it’s toward the end of this funnel when we create and send a sales quote and thereby kick-off the closing process.
There are opportunities to create repeatable processes throughout the funnel, of course. Consistent, repeatable follow-up steps after a demo; consistent, repeatable product/service presentation and configuration; consistent, repeatable calling methods (e.g., scripts). But it’s in closing a sale — once you send a quote — where repeatability is perhaps easiest to create, track, and profit from.
Quoting software: a pre-configured, cloud-based, repeatable closing process
Sometimes, people refer to a repeatable process as a template. In quoting software, that’s literal. When you kick off the closing process, you do so with a sales quote built on a template. This can be as basic as one included with a quoting system, or (ideally) one customized to suit your brand and your market. In EVERY case, it shouldn't be something you’re building from scratch each time.
The steps to building a quote in most sales proposal software solutions are repeatable: choose a template, customize it for your prospect (hopefully with a little more than just adding a name, title, and company), adding your product and pricing configurations, sending it, doing your follow-up, and getting it signed. And if you’re using the right software, these steps are mostly automated. More importantly, they’re captured and reported on.
Because it’s only through reporting where we can access the data we need to improve our repeatable process: analyzing which quotes (and reps) are closing and which aren’t, where bottlenecks occur, which products and pricing are working most often to drive business.
With a tool like iQuoteXpress, every step you take after a customer says “send me a quote” is trackable, repeatable, and therefore improvable. And no matter how good (or not good) your salespeople may be at the top of the funnel, quoting software helps them all be great closers.
