A Basic Overview of the Sales Process
The sales process involves the following steps – no matter what product or service you are selling:
Know your target audience
Attract attention
Build interest
Answer questions
Address hurdles to buying
Ask them to “buy” or “do” the thing you want
Deliver what you say you will
Reengage
You first work to know who your target audience is. Is it a specific demographic? A specific group of people? A specific group of people in a specific region? The process that remains requires you to curate your customers’ experience through steps 2 through 8.
In this experience you guide them from step to step in order to build their interest in your product and move them closer to saying “yes” to buying your product. This is true whether you sell a physical product or a service. And different tools are used to support different steps of this process.
When talking about sales – there are things we push outward from us (outbound activities) and things we do to respond when people come inward towards us (inbound activities).
Examples of outbound tools & activities
Social media posting, where we push messaging outwards with. Publicity where we push messaging in something like press releases away from us. There is no one coming inwards towards us in outbound activities; rather we’re just pushing messaging outwards.
Examples of inbound tools & activities
Having a website that answers questions about our products when people come inward towards us by visiting our website. Having a customer service or sales team that answers the phone to answer questions when customers reach inward towards us.
We leverage different tools in this way to push messaging outwards away from us or to support communications when people come inwards towards us.
How outbound and inbound tools can work together: The Customer Journey
We also leverage outbound and inbound tools/activities differently based on what we are trying to accomplish in the sales process. Ideally – before launching a marketing or sales campaign, we think through the entire pathways that our customers may take when interacting with us: The Customer Journey.
When a step is missed - or when a connection between two steps is not provided on your customer journey - you can lose a buyer’s attention.
For example, say you had a social media post asking them to register for an event. Is it easy for them to jump from a specific social media post about the event to a webpage where you want them to sign up or read more about the event? By “easy” I mean does that take the fewest clicks for them it can? Is it taking 8 confusing clicks and wandering through your website to find what they need (risking people’s attention dropping off and them bouncing back off your website) or is it one click that gets them there?
Your goal in sales
Make it easy for people to say “yes” to you. Make every step of the customer journey as easy as it can be. Know what your customer questions and hurdles to buying are. Design the customer journey to address those hurdles head on – answer questions, provide information, be helpful. Customer services starts with your first engagement with people.