Moving Words – Do you have a Sales Process?

Written and submitted by Timothy Brady.

Sales is the lifeblood of any moving company. Without sales revenue it’s virtually nonexistent, yet many companies fail to have a Sales Process. What is a Sales Process?

It’s a defined series of steps your salespeople use to usher potential shippers from first contact to scheduled move. It’s essentially a flowchart that explains each step a prospect takes in the process of becoming a shipper.

• What information does each prospective shipper require to go through each step to become a scheduled move?
• What are the tools your salespeople provide to guide the prospective shipper to select your company as their mover of choice?
• How long does a prospective shipper need to complete each step to becoming a scheduled move?
• What are your conversion rates? Take each step in the sales process and look at the conversion rate of each prospective shipper through each of the steps. What is the percentage of prospects that move to the next step? Finally, what’s the percentage of the original prospects who actually schedule a move with your company?

To efficiently grow your revenue, the Sales Process must cover both Sales and Marketing. Typically the cause of Sales and Marketing miscommunication is the different perspective each group has of the Sales Process flow chart. The worst situation is when each team has its own method with its own language.

The first step to developing a highly successful revenue engine is to guarantee your Sales and Marketing teams are working with a single flow chart, based on shared knowledge of the important steps in the sales process. Your sales activity must include your entire process from lead generation to close. It must be a coordinated effort between Marketing and your Sales people.

Think of this flow chart as a funnel, with raw leads going in the top; next, Marketing qualifying those leads into the ones with potential to scheduling a move, to Sales taking those qualified leads and developing selling opportunities from them, thereby growing them through the sales process to becoming scheduled moves.

For this coordination between Marketing and Sales to be successful, it’s important to develop a Service Level Agreement to reduce the ‘blame game’ between departments.

First, develop a list of concerns and expectations for each of the departments.

• Sales expects a steady stream of incoming leads from Marketing.
• Sales expects leads from Marketing to be of a decent quality, matching the company’s preferred shipper profile.
• Marketing expects the leads to transition smoothly from them to Sales.
• Marketing expects the leads to be worked on promptly and regularly.
• And finally and most important, agree on the definition of Marketing qualified and Sales accepted leads. Nothing will sour a departmental relationship faster than a disconnect in which the leads provided by Marketing are not what Sales needs.

Next, the trick to ensuring each department’s needs are fulfilled is to utilize a Service Level Agreement between Sales and Marketing. Developing one is not as difficult as it sounds. The agreement is only four steps:

1. Have Sales and Marketing agree on the definition of what a quality, usable lead is. Then have Marketing agree as to how many qualified leads it will deliver to Sales on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
2. Sales and Marketing must agree on the minimum follow-up requirements for every qualified lead.
3. Develop a reporting mechanism to measure and communicate how Marketing is doing on its qualified lead goals.
4. Develop a reporting mechanism to measure and communicate how Sales is following up on those leads.

By having a defined Sales Process that coordinates lead generation to final sale between your Marketing and Sales departments, and then documenting the results from those activities from raw lead to scheduled move, you’ll have the power to:

• Determine the revenue generated along with your Return On Investment (ROI) of your varied marketing campaigns
• Give your sales staff the means to sell more efficiently and with better results
• Create more accurate sales & revenue forecasts and reports
• Evaluate which steps in the sales process take the greatest amount of time and develop means to improve building the prospective shipper from raw lead to scheduled move
• Generate and design better sales materials and tools
• Improve the efficiency and quality of your marketing campaigns
• Reduce the time your sales people take on estimates

And best of all, having a defined Sales Process will help to grow your company’s revenue, giving you opportunity to grow and be more profitable.