Establishing the Sales Process

It’s 2019. With just the tap of a finger, we can know anything about any business.

In the current world of business-consumer relationships, a business’ online reputation can ultimately determine the success or failure of a business. Don’t believe us? The proof is in the pudding.

How many people do you think search online reviews before visiting a business? Did you guess something below 90%? The number is staggering but true— 90% of people look up reviews before even visiting a business and online reviews have been shown to impact 67.7% of purchasing decisions.

As a sales team within a company, it is incredibly important to become knowledgeable with your customer’s objectives. The customer already knows everything they need to know about a product from their research. Now, they’re looking for answers to their demands and concerns to find out if “the product is right for me”.

It’s also important for sales teams to use knowledge from actual customer experiences to create several personas. These are archetypes of people composed of details such as age, income, occupation, and values.

With this information in hand, you can then describe your target customers’ most significant pain points and key purchase drivers that persuade them to rely on your product. Once you have this information, you can create content that speaks to each customer on their preferred content format.

At the end of the day, it’s all about knowing who your customers are—this is the core of Sales Enablement! Sales Enablement requires identifying the process, technology, and content that aids sales teams in selling efficiently, especially considering that promotional content is no longer an effective way to sell.

When you create a new strategy around Sales Enablement, your content will undergo a similar evolution. Instead of promotional material, sales and marketing must collaborate to create helpful content that assists the buyer at every stage of his or her journey. Because each customer will have a different journey, it’s helpful to visually map out these journeys.

Once you create “journey maps”, flesh out personas to describe the kinds of customers that your sales team will most often come across. Creating in-depth buyer personas is a useful thought exercise designed to identify the content that customers need.

The numbers don’t lie—90% of us look up reviews before taking any course of action online. It’s the way of the digital world now. When sales teams are able to put aside the “traditional sales” personalities and philosophies, teams are enabled to focus on the customer, their behaviors, and what makes them want to take positive action.

Read Kelly’s full article, How to Adapt to the Well-Educated Modern Buyer, on Sales and Marketing Management.